The Apple iPhone looks very very promising and has a slew of great features. The prospects for availability in Canada are worrisome though.
Apple announced the much anticipated iPhone January 9th, 2007. There had been literally years of rumors about this device and it seem to live up to much of what people had hoped for. A lot of the promotional discussion has related to the iPod features, which indeed seem very nice. What really excites me however, is the overall feature set and system environment.
Years ago Apple sold the first serious PDA, the Apple Newton, and the Newton included several features that would still be innovative today, include a brilliant (albeit imperfect) recognition egine for cursive hardwriting. I owned one, and have been hankering for similar features on my Palm Treo every since.
The iPhone runs OS X, Apple's UNIX-based operating system. As such, it finally promises to provide an ensemble of real desktop-class appltications in a fully portable device. Sometimes such promises from phone manufacturers fail to come to fruition, but the fact that it runs the same operating system as desktop machines (not a second-rate clone with only a similar name, like Windows CE) makes this promised software a very safe bet.
Further, a comment lament from smart phone users is that...
their phones don't really sync properly and/or fully with their desktop machines. This one really will! Oh, any the fact it both runs a real web browser and also a real email client (with IMAP as well as POP) is a big win for me, as I am sure it will be ahit for many users. Why other companies didn't do this before is beyond me, although the extensive infrastructure and verticle product integration is almost certainly the reasons. I'll bet the power management and price are also issue too.
Better yet, the iPhone is a quad-band GSM phone!! This means that, unlike most phones you can buy, the iPhone will work EVERYWHERE: Canada, USA, Europe, India, China. I have been looking for a Quad-band phone with a good feature set for a while, and this is great news. (In Canada, the compatibility should be with Fido and Rogers.) The really bad news for Canadians is that there is an ongoing trademark dispute between Apple (who filed for a Cnadaian trademark on the iPhone name), and another company who filed an earlier trademark on the same name and who are opposing Apple's request. This might delay rollout even beyond the sad but normally sluggish pace of Canadian phone companies phone adoption rates.
On top of that, Apple seems to have built a really nice phone-specific user interface based on the touch screen. This device really knocked me over. It's also kind of interesting to compare this to the Zune, which was a much-hyped device that really failed to deliver something desirable, and in fact seems to have embodied a series of astonishly-poor design choices such as imposing DRM even on public-domain MP3 files you download into it.
My one really big regret is that I didn't buy a pile of Apple stock before the produce was announced!
