iPhone Mania

See for yourself the reaction in this interview with Steve Jobs. Many highlights of the phone features, wall street and market analysis and general reaction to the announcement of the iPhone.

New York Times columnist David Pogue has published an ammended blog entry containing a second round of FAQs everyone seems to interested in finding answers to. This is definitely worth the click, as it paints a clearer picture of this “micro” OSX platform. I found one comment from Steve Jobs to be rather dishy…

Markoff: “And what are you thinking about Flash and Java?”

Jobs: “Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain.”

Markoff: “Flash?”

Jobs: “Well, you might see that.”

Markoff: “What about YouTube–”

Jobs: “Yeah, YouTube—of course. But you don’t need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get ‘em to up their video resolution at the same time, by using h.264 instead of the old codec.”

Err..I hate to break this to Steve but YouTube’s embedded video playback feature is based on Flash, so I’m not sure whether he understood the relevance of Markoff’s line of questions regarding Flash and its inclusion in the iPhone. Partnering with YouTube isn’t going to enable playback of YouTube content on the iPhone unless that partnership involves said company building a portable Flash package for Apple’s new phone. But I digress.

Link

No Tags

We have heard and seen about Google Maps on the iPhone, about the phone software, about Yahoo push email, stock and weather widgets and the SMS TXTing ability on the iPhone.

What we have not been shown is the calendaring application, Notes and the camera. In an earlier blog post I brought up the liklihood that software for the iPhone would not remain an Apple-only thing forever.

Calendars are not that exciting, there isn't too much you can do with Notes. I expect the photo software to use some of the whiz-bang multi-touch capabilities we have been shown. But what else will there be? The answer may well be in the OS X Dashboard - widgets.

There is a huge value to these small pieces of code and I think the usefulness and ingenuity of the userbase should allow the iPhone to run some pretty spectacular things.

The list of widgets available grows all the time and many of these are easily adaptable to a mobile environment. I can imagine check server status on the iPhone through use of a widget or using a widget to track my packages without having to use the Safari browser to go to UPS.

The golden egg is truly the small snippets of functionality that extend the device. I can't see Apple ignoring this ability.

As “iPhone euphoria” slowly wears off, replaced with sobering reality, some of iPhone’s less shiny aspects are beginning to come into view. Wilmington North Corolina’s StarNews (I didn’t know they had newspapers in NC. Wonder if they have internets as well ) pointed out the unfairness of Apple’s FairPlay digital rights management (DRM) technology which locks users into Apple’s walled garden by limiting playback of songs purchased through the iTunes Store only on Apple authorized hardware. Since Apple doesn’t license FairPlay to any other vendor, that means you can only listen to these legally purchased tracks on an iPod, or iPhone in this case.

Needless to say a good many users, and competitors to Apple, are not happy with this arrangement. Some are seeking legal recourse, accusing Apple of being a monopoly.

As consumers become more aware of how copy protection limits perfectly lawful behavior, they should throw their support behind the music labels that offer digital music for sale in plain-vanilla MP3 format, without copy protection.

Apple pretends that the decision to use copy protection is out of its hands. In defending itself against Ms. Tucker’s lawsuit, Apple’s lawyers noted in passing that digital-rights-management software is required by the major record companies as a condition of permitting their music to be sold online: “Without D.R.M., legal online music stores would not exist.”

Link

No Tags

One of the pioneering features of the iPhone according to the keynonte address by Steve Jobs is the introduction of Visual Voicemail where voicemail messages are represented visually and you can select which messages to listen to in Random Access manner rather than sequentially - eliminating the requirement to hear messages you don't care about in order to get to those you do.

This is an obvious application for a visual connection to voicemail and surprisingly absent from the marketplace until now (or rather, until June).

I have to wonder if the iPhone will further allow "folders" inside visual voicemail to automagically sort incoming voicemails into categories.

There are two iPhone accessories announced by Apple last Tuesday. The stereo headphones come with a tiny dongle, microphone and a switch. You just have to push it together to answer or hang up on a call. Cool! Isn’t it?...

The iPhone frenzy continues with iPhone Unboxed. They just got their hands on their freshly delivered iPhone! Anticipating June’s posting, they are giving us a preview of the excitement we will fell next June! another picture after the break...

Watch this funny video about the iPhone. The iPhone it’s about everything you ever wish from a portable device….and more....

I find it curious that the iPhone is not being rolled out as a 3G phone and will not offer connection to Cingular's BroadbandConnect service whichoffers connection speeds of 400 to 700Kbps. Why when the new Palm Treo 750 does?

There is still time for additions to the iPhone specs (afterall we only know what we are told) and I certainly hope the folks at both Apple and Cingular are paying attention. It may be that the target market is not in fact the business traveler, but rather the audience that owns both a phone and iPod currently. It may be they are more concerned with getting the devices into as many hands of these people as possible and less concerned with addressing the network connectivity issues of those on the road.

For the most part the Wi-Fi connection will allow for high speed data access, but the point of a cell phone with broadband capability is to have it available at high speeds at all times.

With EDGE network speeds similiar to those of a dial-up connection one has to wonder if Apple plans a later 3G version.

Of all the shortcomings of the iPhone this has got to be the one that concerns those of us who hope to see Apple gain strong acceptance in this market.

Incipio didn’t lose any time! They are already promoting an iPhone zipper case. Their upcoming iPhone case will secure your iPhone with a Velcro attachment. The case has a compartment for credit cards and money. There is also a holder...