iDontgetit
posted by saurabh in Schmapitalism, Technocrisy |Please, please, PLEASE, can someone explain to me the appeal behind an iPhone? Here we have a $600 device - the equivalent of a modestly-priced laptop computer - that, as far as I can tell, succeeds at providing the following services:
* Phone
* Internet
* Camera
* Music
Now, many devices have provided these before in combinations of twos and threes. I suppose the iPhone might be the first to provide these in one package, and has the usual Apple stylish design and the propensity to break. And yet, YET, the iPhone is being hailed as a “revolutionary” device!
Here is where I put on my “what the fuck” hat.*
I am unclear exactly what revolution the iPhone is supposed to precipitate. People being able to listen to music on the go? No, no, this was accomplished some twenty years ago with the Sony Walkman. People being able to answer the phone on the go? No, no, this was accomplished some fifteen years ago with the first cell phone (whatever it was). People being able to access the Internet on the go? No - dozens of different sorts of devices are doing this even as we speak. In fact, it seems like a large minority of phones are now somehow ‘Net capable.
As to the iPhone’s stylish design and (putative) ease of operation: if this is revolutionary, then the world is in sad, sad shape. First, bad design is not something that requires advanced technology to overcome. Bad design should not happen, period. There is only one reason why you should release a badly-designed product: because you can get away with it. Is this the revolution? That someone has circumvented the fact that people are willing to tolerate crappy products, merely because NO ONE, to date, has bothered to make a passable one? I am skeptical. In any case, making it slightly easier to enter text into a phone does not qualify as a revolution in my book.
So, what, exactly is the revolution the iPhone has allowed? As far as I can tell, it lets us do one thing: it lets us (after spending $600) throw out our iPods.
As a geek, what I want from my phone is the ability to futz around with it. My current phone has some amazingly bad presets - button bindings, for example. Why can’t I change those button bindings? Surely that would vastly improve the appeal and usability of the phone. Every phone, additionally, is equipped with a very crappy, low-baud bluetooth modem, and usually with an equally crappy IR port. This is an absurdly powerful functionality that is completely underutilized. Why do I still have to tell people my phone-number, for example? Why can’t I just squirt out a bluetooth signal to their phone, announcing who I am? Why can’t I set my phone to respond automatically to a bluetooth transmitter in a movie theater, putting it into silent mode the moment I enter the hall? Why can’t I easily patch into my neighbor’s conversation via bluetooth? Why doesn’t every fricking cell phone let me control my TV?
More to the point, why isn’t there a phone with an open API that lets people build such applications? Cell platforms should be minimal operating systems that third parties can add onto. Such a cell phones could do all sorts of awesome nonsense with relatively trivial effort. THAT would be revolutionary. I suspect, however, there’s too much money to be made nickel-and-diming us, so we’ll have to please ourselves with the likes of the iPhone. As far as I can tell from the frenzy, fake orgasms are better than the real thing anyway.
* You know the one: it has a large stuffed vulture on it, last seen on the head of Neville Longbottom’s grandmum.
Loading ...
Powered by FireStats
Remember Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (v.1)? Pokemon? Power Rangers? Transformers (V.1)? The same kids who grew up following those fads and buying every ridiculous piece of merchandising grew up and started buying iPhones.
and before there were walkmans, there were transistor radios and deejays who could distinguished from robots.
you wanna go back 20 years, though, this thing’s more like the pepsi-generation star trek command stations. or actually, in quiet moments, i’ve been thinking to call it the world’s first sales kiosk in the palm of your hand.
i do think it’s a big improvement in design — a win for fans of pretty — allowing visual elements to be used directly in hunts for basic answers — giving the fast more ways to beat the slow — it’s ok. right now it’s a slave. maybe the idea will be liberated.
The Treo (among others) does all 4, and runs Windows Mobile, which for all the pooh-poohing of MS, at least has an extremely well-developed API and all of the same top of the line development tools that Windows does. The big win for the iphone, in my estimation, is the amazing screen. As you say: if this is a revolution, we are in serious trouble. Besides, as someone who uses the text message and email functionality of the phone several times an hour, the tradeoff of a tactile keyboard for more screen real estate is not one I’m willing to make.
My old Audiovox Pocket PC does all four, has the same amount of screen real estate, AND a QWERTY keyboard. And it integrates well with my windows system and handles word and excel files fairly smoothly.
I generally hate on Apple Hype, but I have had a chance to check out the iPhone and I will say that it does have a very pretty music playing interface and the screen, besides being big, is very bright and clear. But hardly a revolution.
I read that cell phones in Japan are doing some of the things that you want: pointing and clicking at billboards to go to company websites; exchanging phone numbers by pointing and clicking; and deactivating when entering some buildings. No source, sorry.
I do like some of your other ideas, however, that never occured to me, like the cell phone/remote control option. How about a glucose monitor for diabetics?
The other day, I was thinking about Back To The Future, remarking that many of the devices featured in that movie are available now–I guess it would be pretty easy to have one’s cell phone project a video image of the caller on the big screen tv, ala Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.