If you haven’t yet heard (ha), Apple is planning to take the cellular phone market by storm with a new cellphone that promises to do everything you wish your smartphone did now, better than you ever imagined. The basics: they’ve packed a widescreen touchscreen display into the surface of the phone, which is only slightly larger than an iPod 5G. It runs a stripped-down version of OS X, and includes versions of Safari and Dashboard alongside the integrated SMS, e-mail and iPod apps. It’ll set you back $499 for the 4GB version or $599 for the 8GB version, after you factor in the discount from signing up for two years with Cingular. It’s also an exclusive Cingular phone; no Verizon or what-have-you, looks like. Features like a list of incoming voicemails and Google Maps integration are neat little Apple-UI touches.
Okay, so it’s a smarter smart phone. First-day impressions of the iPhone:
Expensive as all hell. It’s a $600 phone, which arguably puts the iPhone well out of reach of most customers. The only people who will be able to afford a post-contract price that high and the data+voice plan to go along with it are people looking for their next smartphone and are willing to pay a handsome sum for it. Of course, Apple’s been down this road before, most recently in 2001 with the iPod. We all know how that worked out.
But just to crunch the numbers for us here in Canada: assuming this phone comes out through Rogers/Fido (and considering they’re the major GSM carrier in Canada, I don’t see who else would put it out), it’ll probably be priced around $699 CAD for the 8GB version. And that’s with the two-year contract lock-in, remember; buying the phone without a contract will either be impossible or way more expensive, and let’s not even get into unlocking the phone for use on other carriers (not so much of an issue in Canada, of course).
Rogers’ current Blackberry data plans are about $60 for 25MB of bandwidth (or there’s a $65 plan with “25 + 25 MB,” whatever the hell that means). Considering the iPhone uses EDGE networks, which are slower than true-3G networks, it won’t be that easy to use up all that bandwidth in a week, but you’re still going to have to watch it. In any case, even assuming 25MB (or 25+25—seriously, Rogers, what the hell?) is enough for you, that’s $60 on top of whatever voice plan you want to use. Assuming you take the cheapest voice plan, add on essential basics like call display (how else is the iPhone going to show you that snazzy contact info when someone calls?) and voicemail (ditto the “visual voicemail” feature), and include the various service charges, you’re looking at $100/month CAD. Of course, if you’re a big smartphone user, you’re probably already paying this much anyways. Such a plan would easily double my phone bill, though. Not that it matters, because I don’t have the cash for a $600-700 phone anyways.
Touchscreen: love it or despise it? For a company that prides itself on its fantastic UI, Apple is making quite a jump in utilizing a touchscreen. First, the good bits: it’s a multi-touch screen, which means you can touch it in more than one place and the screen will keep track. This sort of technology has been in development for a while, and the iPhone is the first major application. It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t sound that interesting until you see how it works, and then you’ll wonder how you got along without it all this time. The Quicktime demos on the iPhone site really demonstrate the effectiveness of the touchscreen—in theory, anyways.
In practice, the jury’s still out. The worst problem is the QWERTY soft keyboard. Imagine trying to fit the full-sized Blackberry QWERTY keyboard onto a surface no wider than an iPod. Now imagine if you didn’t have any buttons, but just a flat surface with no tactile feedback. People with big thumbs may find the iPhone more annoying than exciting; New York Times columnist David Pogue says “heavy BlackBerry addicts may not want to jump ship just yet.” Far more interesting is the web browsing UI, which allows you to zoom in on parts of a website by double-tapping or (my favourite) grabbing a portion of the page with thumb and forefinger, and “stretching” the section to fit your screen. Zooming out works the same way, but in reverse. The same UI is in use for photo viewing, and it’s an intuitive method of zooming quickly and precisely.
Cingular, EDGE, and IM/VOIP. When rumours of the iPhone first surfaced years ago, one of the big questions had to do with cellular carriers. How was Apple, a company known for its control issues, going to play nice with the cellular carriers it would have to do business with? Some thought Apple might start its own carrier, though that would involve setting up an entire cell network of its own. Others thought Apple might instead become a virtual operator, like Virgin Mobile in Canada or Boost in the States; piggyback onto someone else’s network, but maintain an independent retail presence. There was even the possibility that Apple wouldn’t even bother with the whole carrier question, and sell its phones unlocked for use on any GSM network. With the rest of the industry slowly but surely headed in that direction (Nokia has already started opening phone boutiques featuring unlocked high-end phones), it wouldn’t be out of the question for Apple to do the same.
Unfortunately, now we have the definitive answer: Apple has tied itself to Cingular. This presents several problems. First, it means you’re going to have to jump ship to Cingular if you want this phone in the States. If you’re with another carrier, tough beans; if you’re locked into a contract with said carrier, too bad. Second, associating the iPhone with any carrier means giving in to that carrier’s demands regarding the phone’s feature set. Luckily, this hasn’t happened so much in Canada, but in the States many carriers will lock out phone features because they interfere with revenue streams. Transferring MP3 ringtones via Bluetooth? Forget it—you’ll have to download them from the carrier’s site instead, and pay for the privilege. Same thing with wallpapers and screen savers. Want to use the phone’s IM functionality to hook into AIM or MSN? Sure—if the carrier lets you. And so on and so forth.
Steve Jobs made a point of saying the iPhone ran on OS X, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that his claim is like saying other smartphones run Windows XP. They don’t; they run stripped-down versions of Windows, specifically designed for the smartphone market and requiring a different set of applications. You can no more run Photoshop on your Windows smartphone than you can dig your way to China. And it turns out the iPhone is even worse off than most smartphones; you won’t be able to install any new applications on the iPhone at all. In other words, what you see is what you get, and nothing more. Want an ebook reader? Too bad. Skype functionality? Look somewhere else. An IM client? What, you too good to pay for Cingular’s SMS services? Basically, until someone hacks the iPhone to allow open development, you won’t be able to install new apps like you can on other smartphones, and this may turn out to be the real dealkiller for some.
Finally, let’s talk EDGE. It’s slow. Pogue wrote that the phone’s web performance felt a bit sluggish, and that was on a wifi connection:
Both in the onstage demo and during my hands-on hour, the Web speed was OK—not great, but OK. But all of this used the phone’s built-in Wi-Fi, not Cingular’s notoriously slow Edge network. I couldn’t help wondering how bad the speed will be when you’re connecting over the cellular airwaves. (Here again, though, I was playing with a prototype whose software will undergo a lot of fine-tuning between now and June.)
EVDO is a much better standard for cellular data, but on the other hand EVDO doesn’t seem to work over GSM networks. And let’s remember that without the portability inherent in GSM phones (two words: SIM cards), there’d be no hope of ever unlocking the iPhone for use with other carriers or abroad. UMTS seems to be the proper 3G solution for GSM, but its rollout has been slow and EDGE is far more widespread. Presumably, in an ideal world, Apple wouldn’t have bothered with EDGE, but it may be the best out of a bunch of bad choices.
A lot of potential, not quite ready for prime time? So we’re pretty much where the iPod was in 2001. As everyone keeps mentioning, a lot of people pooh-poohed the original iPod for not being all that innovative, for being too expensive, and for only working with Macs—an extremely small portion of the computing market back then. What’s worth remembering is that the iPod didn’t become the giant success it is today by sticking to that formula; it got cheaper, it dropped the Mac-only clause, and the unique UI and small form factor made sense.
The iPhone has similar teething problems today: the platform is locked down, the non-tactile keyboard may need tweaking (though the predictive input is an interesting solution), it’s priced out of most people’s budgets, and it only works with Cingular. Plus the smartphone market is far more mature than the MP3 player market was back in 2001. But the iPhone has some things going for it as well: it’s much more obviously innovative than the iPod was, it’s the best example yet of portable convergence, and the price will come down as time goes on. Enough people will buy a first-gen iPhone that we’ll see a second-gen iPhone before too long, and then a third. And by the time that third-gen phone comes along, it’ll probably be cheap enough that everyone will jump on board. Suddenly Apple will have its one-percent share of the cell phone market and then some.