Today we look again at the iPhone in the first part of a two-part installment on the new killer mobile phone from Apple. The release of this juggernaught is imminent, and we want to take a last look at what Apple has to offer before the curtain is drawn back. Part 2 will come on Friday when we talk about how the iPhone has been received by Planet Earth and, hopefully, reveal a few things about what one can’t possibly know until they hold it in their hand.
It was more than six months ago when we first heard about Apple’s entry into the world of mobile phones, and a lot has happened since then. When the iPhone first hit the stage at Macworld back then, the distant release date gave us half a year not only to see what the final iteration of the iPhone itself would be, but also to see how competitors would respond and counter what it has to offer.
Apple is not going out of its way to promote the iPhone as a "gaming device", but you’ve gotta believe that this thing has the potential to be the Babe Ruth of mobile time-wasting; from the sophisticated OS X-based operating system to the gorgeous (and large) video display, the iPhone can facilitate some truly quality time-wasting. Note, however, that we use the word "potential"; while there are plans to get quality games onto the iPhone, it’s going to be up to Apple to make sure that the games keep coming. This is because Apple plans to keep the iPhone "closed", letting only a precious few big-time developers have the iPhone SDK. We really covered the whole question of the iPhone’s closed system a while back, so we’ll try not to revisit old ground, but it can’t be overstated that "potential" is not the same as a promise, and we fear that the greatest gaming phone that will ever be made won’t be used to its potential.
Let’s look at this thing in a bit more depth, shall we?
The iPhone
Apple has had six months to pull back all the curtains and cry "ta-dahh!" on the iPhone’s features and selling points and, with the device’s release imminent (June 29), we can be sure that we’ve heard everything about what the iPhone will be able to do. It seems as though the phone is about three strong features wrapped in the trademark Apple style and design. For those of you who have not yet seen the iPhone, the most fundamental thing about it is the touch-screen which has replaced the keypad of other phones. Rather than punching analog keys to get around, the iPhone’s screen can display any variety of task-specific controls necessary for whatever jobs you might need it to do. Though the limitless flexibility of control that comes from the touch-screen launches the iPhone immeasurably ahead of other mobile phones in terms of tailoring the user input to the job, the touch-screen is also the iPhone’s biggest weakness. We’ll get to that later.
The main feature the iPhone offers, naturally, is the phone itself; as Apple CEO Steve Jobs has said, the "killer app" for a phone is the ability to make calls, and the iPhone facilitates that with ease. Bring up a name or number in your address book and touch it (or poke out the number the old fashioned way) and you’re chatting in the way you’d expect to be: Phone to your ear and all. Apple boasts other phone-related features as "breakthroughs", but it’s clear to see that their PR department has a hard time adding a lot of sex to basic phone functionality; the best secondary feature of the iPhone’s phone feature is the ability to listen to voice mail messages out of order from the date they arrived in your in-box or how SMS messages are displayed in conversational "speech bubble" style (reminiscent of Apple’s iChat for Macintosh computers). It’s solid stuff, sure, but not exactly what you’d call Nobel Prize winners. We can’t knock them for this, though; phone use is meat-and-potatoes. It needs to be simple and easy, lest you end up with a Microsoft-style approach where simple tasks are muddied by too many options the user is forced to choose from or (shudder) a digital assistant not unlike the pesky paperclip that MS Word users know and loathe.
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