First a little disclosure. I don’t currently own a Mac. It’s not that I don’t want one, it’s just that until now a few key tools I need at work weren’t available for OSX (VMWare for example).
That being said, I can’t help but drool over the iPhone. The touch screen looks beautiful and the fact that it’s backed by a OSX sounds very powerful. From a developers point of view this is very compelling to me as Palm development is, well, nasty. I love that there are hundreds of good Palm apps available for download or pay but OSX is just such a powerful platform that I would much rather do OSX development than Palm development. J2ME is fun but I’ve only tinkered with it. It will be very interesting to see how Apple will release the development tools.
Here’s the features that I really want to find a little more about before I think of dropping $500 on one though.
- Processor. Will it be truly fast enough? One problem with Treos and many other smart phones is that the processor is just fast enough for normal use and dog slow when you need a little more juice.
- Battery life. Really, spouting stats at Mac World based on lab usage and real world stats are 2 completely different things.
- Voice quality. Again, the thing that makes people the most happy with a cell phone, first and foremost is the quality of the voice connection. Do calls drop? Is the call clear and free of distortion? I think this hurt the Blackberry early on.
The only other thing that would hold be back would be Cingular. Sorry, been there, dropped them. Their coverage in my neighborhood was horrible. I literally had to stand on my back porch to make a call. So we went to AT&T with not much more luck. I have been very happy with Sprint and it will take a lot to convince me to go back to Cingular.
The bottom line is that I really want one, but I can wait until revision 2 comes out. Hopefully by then it’ll be opened up to more carriers and a few of the early kinks will be ironed out. Until then I’ll just be drooling.
No such luck.
I watched the Jobs keynote last night, and during the iPhone presentation they brought out the Cingular dude who, when not telling us how great Cingular was, made it very clear that Apple had signed a “multi-year, exclusive contract” with Cingular. Also, given the fact that the visual voicemail stuff that Jobs was impressed with appears to be proprietary to Cingular, I don’t see Sprint being able to offer it any time soon.
I’m also interested in the development particulars of the device. MS has done a decent job of supporting embedded programming in WinCE via their Visual Studio stuff…. but there are still little quirks you have to deal with programmatically. If the Apple stuff is transparent (and even better, if they start pushing out multi-touch for PC devices!! \o/), then this could be very cool.
But, I still can’t get over it…. Cingular? For real?
Comment by spoonix — January 11, 2007 @ 10:10 am