Today is Christmas Eve. No, really it is.
While the unwashed hordes have descended on Las Vegas the past few days for the annual Consumer Electronics Show to hear Bill Gates talk for the umpteenth (and hopefully, last?) time about how Windows and its Media Player 12 or 13 will be the key to the wired home of the future, most of the civilized world has been waiting in anticipation for the real deal. Yes, MacWorld begins tomorrow, and at 9:00 a.m., Grand Master of Flash Steve Jobs will unveil the bounties that have been cooked up in the golden labs of Cupertino for the past year. I, for one, am on pins and needles to see what is going to be revealed even though microbes clinging to volcanic cones at the bottom of the Marianas Trench already know that some kind of iPhone will be demonstrated–and of course, I am not talking about the lame-ass trick Cisco pulled last week.
Ful disclosure: I sat in the first row at MacWorld 2000, well within the twenty-foot perimeter of Jobs’s reality-distortion field, and all I can say is, yes it does exist and you will buy whatever he says is now the coolest thing ever.
But let me get back to the title of my post. I want an iPhone because every cell phone in existence sucks. They really do. Oh don’t get me wrong, I love having my Razor to make calls but the graphic user interface of every phone I have seen DESPERATELY calls out for the Apple treatment of clean, clear, crisp lines. It’s almost as if the operating system was designed as the very last afterthought before putting it in the plastic case and shipping it out from whichever southeast Asian nation is now the cheapest place to manufacture these things.
I especially want to see the marriage of telephony and iPodphony. Something that scares the crap out of me about current um, “solutions” for marrying music and telephones is that I would be rockin’ at the gym to the My Chemical Romance album when all of a sudden I run out of batteries and now I have no communication capabilities. Once I began relying on a cell phone, the thought of having it go dead while driving home in my normally reliable but increasingly high-mileage VW now turns me into a quivering pile o’ goo. Some of the Rumors sites on the Web have claimed that Apple solves this by utilizing two separate batteries, one for phone use and one for music. Now why in the world did nobody else think of that?
I want an iPhone too, mainly for the reasons you described. Except I don’t want it to be an iPod. I have an iPod. Everyone has a freakin iPod. We don’t need another iPod.
I want to be able to have all my contacts there. Maybe calendar, excellent phone features. iChat? Maybe.
Wouldn’t it be something if it’s a video phone that will work with (insert first carrier here) right out of the box?
Oh I agree, unfortunately I was rushing this post to get it out before tomorrow’s pronouncements or else I would have shaped my argument better.
I have no doubt that iCal and an Address Book will be integrated via Bluetooth. But that’s the kind of feature that Jobs will mention casually, as a footnote, not something to salivate over. And video iChat would be fabulous to have integrated out of the box (Dick Tracy strikes again!)
I totally agree with Alex. Here’s hoping that, if Apple is going to do this, they go for solving the UI problems with using cellphones to access the web.
For example, I use the web interface to gmail on my cellphone. It’s my homepage, so seeing my mail is as easy as pusing the Web button on my phone. Clean and simple.
However, Google has come out with a more powerful version of gmail, one that looks and acts more like the gmail we see on the web. But I won’t even bother. Why?
Instead of just pushing a single button to activate it, here’s what I would have to do:
— Press Menu/OK button to bring up my menu
— Scroll down once to the “Downloads” icon
— Press Menu/OK button to bring up my Downloads page
— Scroll Down three times to the “IM and Email” menu item
— Press Menu/OK button to bring up my “IM & Email” page
— Scroll Down twice to the Gmail menu item
— Press Menu/OK button to bring up Gmail
I do that for Google Maps for the cell phone because it has real-time traffic, but no way am I going to do it for the email.
Finally, considering that my current cellphone battery has lasted twice as long as my iPod battery did; Apple had better come up with a helluva solution to this.