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Posted on 01/09/2007 10:18:35 AM PST by AnotherUnixGeek
Capping literally years of speculation on perhaps the most intensely followed unconfirmed product in Apple's history -- and that's saying a lot -- the iPhone has been announced today in collaboration with Cingular. Yeah, we said it: "iPhone," the name the entire free world had all but unanimously christened it from the time it'd been nothing more than a twinkle in Stevie J's eye (comments, Cisco?). Sweet, glorious specs of the 11.6 millimeter device (that's frickin' thin, by the way) include a 3.5-inch wide touchscreen display with multi-touch support, 2 megapixel cam, 8 GB of storage, Bluetooth with EDR, WiFi, and quadband GSM radio with EDGE -- and amazingly, it somehow runs OS X.
My Dell XPS 600 has 6 cooling fans...but they are EXTREMELY quiet, and it has a 650 watt power supply. I am only running one 7900 GS now, and power and cooling have been no problem. When I add the second, we shall see...but I do not expect any problem as the chassis was designed for SLI operation.
It was the wife's Christmas present to old grandpa here.
My biggest issue with this new iPhone is simply to wait until it is available on Verizon because we have such good coverage here...and that will probably allow me to get it cheaper too since it will have been out a while...but I definitiely do want one.
I am also going to wait for Verizon to get the iPhone before I get one. But that think is quite nice out the door.
Those analysts are idiots. I can walk into any Sprint store and get a new phone, if I just want a phone, for free. That is not the competition for a $600 device.
This device is physically too big to make a huge dent there. Once again, it will succeed as the new iPod and mini-tablet, but that isn't the same market.
The fact that you're missing is that the right product doesn't take the market; it makes the market. The iPhone is a cell phone like the iPod was a Walkman or the light bulb was a candle or the Model T was a horse. Apple is competing for the cell phone market like Ford competed with blacksmiths and Edison competed with chandlers.
Your gripe about the size of the gadget is like complaining that a Model T weighs more than a horse, and gee, Molly, that means we'll have to pave the roads and beef up the bridges.
There were other MP3 players before the iPod, but the iPod didn't just outsell them; it outsold them all combined by a factor of hundreds. It created a new market for something people didn't know they needed until they saw it.
I think the iPhone will do for PDA/smartphones what the iPod did for digital music players. Not by showing folks how to better do what they're already doing, which is pretty nifty in itself, but by showing folks how to easily do things they hadn't thought of with a mobile device before.
And if you're looking for a tiny phone, get a bluetooth headset. Or handset. You can use that while the iPhone stays on your belt or in your pocket, briefcase or backpack.
And just to tack on, not apropos to your comments, the Zune is now about as relevant as teats on a boar hog.
It has Bluetooth, so there are probably scores of folding keyboards for PDAs and cell phones that will already work. Look for scores more in the next half-year before the iPhone actually ships.
You read my mind. I use Sprint, and I've found very, very few dark spots in their coverage. Unfortunately, I live in one of them. If I could do WiFi VOIP at home and in the office, over Skype or Vonage or whomever, wireless elsewhere, all ringing to the same phone, I don't think I'd ever need a landline again.
That would jibe with Apple's iPod strategy. Offer a world-killer device for top-dollar, and grab the early-adopters. Then expand your way down the product line a little at a time, each with a little lower price and a feature set to match. The iPod went original, mini, nano, shuffle. I'd expect the iPhone to follow a similar path.
In my opinion, this is a revolutionary product that will turn the cell phone industry upside down. It is basically a merging of iPod, PDA and cell phone.
We all saw how cool the first iPod was in 2001 but nobody saw the tidal wave coming. It took about three years to get the iPod juggernaut rolling. Now five years (and five generations of iPod later), that first iPod looks as clunky as that old VCR player in your closet that you haven't used since 1997.
One can only imagine how future generations of this product are going to evolve. Already, it appears that Apple has a polished mega-selling product on their hands. And it's priced to sell NOW.
Let's just hope they can build factories fast enough to produce them.
Early access to Keynote video - http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/jan/j47d52oo/m_8848125_650_ref.mov
Thanks for that link. Apple's keynote link is swamped right now.
That link appears overwhelmed now too.
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In the demo he entered the address in the Google search window. The map was pulled from Google Maps through the WIFI port internet connection. The phone itself hasn't been FCC approved which is why you can't buy it yet.
I like my Treo 650 a lot too, it may not match the hardware of the iPhone but it has tons and tons of available Palm software apps, and I can even remote control desktop computers using the MobileTS terminal server software. I also get Fox News on MobiTV too, wonder if the iPhone will carry Fox News?
It is extremely impressive, to keep the lid on such a finely finished product you know they were dying to show off. Whether however that translates to market dominance remains to be seen, there are many well established products already in place, with widescale distribution points.
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