iPhone
Big news in the tech world at the moment, with the coolest geek in the world Steve Jobs, delivering his highly anticipated annual Macworld keynote speech yesterday.
The biggest new announcement was that of the iPhone - this cool device combines the features of a widescreen iPod, smart-phone, and mobile internet. You can check out the details at the Apple Website. Now I like te look of this gadget, it’s beautifully styled, and the user interface looks elegant and intuitive, like all Apple products. As an iPod lover, I particularly like the look of the iPod functionality, which is a big advance on the current generation iPods. The widescreen looks great and I could believe this would be a device that you might actually watch shows on (if Apple ever gets it’s act together and makes TV content available outside the USA!) - if nothing else, watching the demos on the Apple site makes me want to check out The Office, a show I haven’t really watched before (the little clip they show is pretty funny).
Father Roderick from SQPN has a good review of the Macworld announcements on his latest Daily Breakfast podcast, and I heartily agree with his comments, including his reservations about the iPhone and Apple TV (Apple’s new media server device). The biggest problems are :
- The storage capacity is way too small - only 4 or 8 Gigabytes. To be taken seriously as an iPod replacement, particularly if you want to store and watch a lot of video, the capacity needs to be greatly enlarged - I would say a minimum of 20 Gig, and hopefully up to 80 Gig or beyond. With 8 Gig capacity this is still not the killer “one gadget to replace all others” that we’ve been hoping for.
- The iPhone will not be available in the US for at least 6 months, and not available in other parts of the world like Australia until 2008! I’m getting tired of this constant lag in the release of products behind the US. In the 21st century there is no excuse for this sort of thing. It simply shows a lack of effort and a lack of care on the part of the big companies like Apple - people outside the USA are treated like second class citizens…. However this delay may turn out to be a blessing in disguise, as hopefully by the time this product is released here Apple may have got around to a second generation iPhone, with much better storage capacity, thus I won’t give in to the temptation to get the first generation product but will be forced to wait for the better next one.
- They haven’t released an updated iPod. The widescreen Video capabilities and new software of the iPod component of the iPhone look so cool - why couldn’t they have released a stand-alone 120Gig widescreen video iPod at the same time? The technology is already there.
- The Apple TV product is underwhelming in it’s functionality. As Fr Roderick says, you can do more in terms of media serving using a Microsoft Xbox-360. I use a great program called TVersity to stream media from my PC to my Xbox 360 which works well in streaming a large range of media formats. Apple have some catching up to do here.
Overall though, it’s exciting news for gadget freaks. I just think it will probably be another year or two before this stuff starts to reach it’s potential. Until then, I’ll still keep carrying around the combination of my trusty Treo 650 phone and 60Gb Video iPod. The hope of the “one gadget to rule them all” is still a little way off, but it’s getting closer…
Categories : Gadgets, Technology, iPod | 1 Comment
