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The iPhone - almost perfect

I am composing this blog entry on the flight back to Portland from San Francisco. I was able to make it to MacWorld again this year, mostly due to the fact that the company I work for, The 451 Group, has an office in San Francisco, and this year, MacWorld corresponded with some work meetings. Shuttling between the office and MacWorld is convenient, with only three blocks between the two locations. Being a member of the press and analyst community means a free media pass, and while the majority of the content at MacWorld does not directly relate to open source, I do end up meeting with a number of vendors each year that have open source related products for the Mac.

When I worked for Excite in the late 90’s, I would time trips to the Redwood City to correspond with MacWorld. At that time, I was writing a regular column on Mac OS X for MacWEEK, and also qualified for a media pass. When I worked for La Quinta from 2001 to 2005, I couldn’t justify a trip out to San Francisco, and every year, the company’s CIO always happen to have his annual strategic planning meeting during the keynote. The agony! I’d do my best to avoid news tidbits and race home after work to watch the video stream of the keynote.

This year, I was able to catch the keynote live, within the reality distortion field in row 13. In front of the media section were rows and rows of VIPs - Apple employees, relatives, business partners, and personal friends of the company’s executive team. Al Gore, a member of the Apple Board of Directors was absent this year, as were a number of the celebrity regulars that trek up to San Francisco for the event from Los Angeles.

The big news this year was the iPhone, and there’s no value in me rehashing any of the details of the device. I will say that the iPhone is the type of device I have been wanting for over a decade, since my love of the now defunct Apple Newton. There was a time in the mid-1990s when I would carry an Apple Newton, a mobile phone, and a digital camera. Just a few months ago, I gave up my digital camera after buying a Sony Ericsson K790a camera phone. Three megapixel was good enough that I really didn’t need a carry around another device.

With the iPhone, I will be able to carry a single device - wow, how long have many of us hoped for this day to come?! One device. Just one. That’s it. One device for making phone calls, reading and sending emails, browsing the web, taking pictures, listening to music, watching TV shows and movies, updating a calendar, and even creating a grocery list. This is pretty damn impressive. There have been some devices already that have done all of these tasks, but they all lacked in fairly major ways. I’ve owned a Sidekick, I’ve owned a BlackBerry, and I’ve almost ended up both a Treo and a Windows Mobile device during the past few years.

On the MacWorld expo floor, there were two iPhones for viewing - both under glass and in some form of demo mode, showing off various functions of the device. The lucky few high-profile journalists were able to get some time with the device and the Apple executive team for Q&A. It’s times like these that I wish I had Walt Mossberg or David Pogue’s job.

I’m thrilled by the iPhone and I intend to buy two - one for my wife who’s been a happy BlackBerry Pearl customer for the past few months. I intend to buy the 8GB model for the extra $100, which will allow me to give up my 30GB video iPod. I won’t be able to store nearly the amount of music and videos I do today, but at 8GB, it’s just enough that I can customize the media content from time to time, opposed to making my iPod the storage device for it all.

The iPhone isn’t exactly perfect, however. There are some glaring omissions from the device that Apple introduced, and I hope Apple addresses as many of these omissions as it can before the public release in June. These won’t stop me from being an iPhone buyer, but I believe they will negatively impact the overall opportunity of the device to achieve the level of sales that Apple is anticipation (10M by 2008).

No developer access. While we do not have an official statement from Apple yet on the ability for developers to create applications (or at least widgets), two reputable sources are reporting that Apple executives confirmed that the device will not be open to third party developers. Update 01/12/07 - Steve Jobs has confirmed in several interviews that the iPhone will be a closed platform…at least for now.

Woah. Think about this for a moment. WTF, Apple?! You have this brilliant mobile platform that could truly revolutionize the mobile phone industry and you are going to block outside innovation from the device? What are you thinking?! What possible reasons do you have from making the iPhone a closed system? With the iPod, a closed system made sense - limited functionality, limited interface inputs - there wasn’t much opportunity here for an application market. The iPhone, on the other hand, is a ’smartphone’ with voice and touch screen inputs, and access to the Internet. It’s a perfect platform for cool applications that extend the functionality of the device into areas that Apple has no interest in doing as part of the standard feature set. A great example here is enterprise applications. Providing a developer toolkit could open up new markets for this device. I predict a huge uproar from the Mac development on this front and hope that the pressure is strong enough to impact Apple’s plans.

No instant messenger client. Apple borrowed the iChat interface for SMS messaging, but what about Internet-based instant messaging? One of the greatest features of the Sidekick is the support for instant messaging. Yet, this is lacking from the iPhone. I don’t understand this at all. Why would this functionality be absent from the iPhone? There are certainly no technical hurdles here, nor can I imagine that Cingular has any problem with this. Apple must think that either a) the market for mobile instant messaging is limited or b) that its inclusion would somehow be confused with SMS. Reality check here - SMS is good for some things, and horrible for others. I can’t have an active, back and forth conversation over SMS, and I can’t rely upon all of my colleagues to be comfortable using SMS throughout the work day to exchange information.

No removable battery. I’ve owned two iPods that had battery life problems after a year of use. How can we be sure here that Apple won’t have battery issues with the iPhone? Can you imagine the outrage of customers having a phone with a bad battery after the warranty period with only an expensive, in-store battery replacement? Plus, what about active users that want to carry a backup battery when they’re on the go? Nope. The five-hour talk time limit of the battery will require some active users to recharge the phone during the middle of the day, which may not always be possible. What if I want to watch a movie on a cross-country flight and then make some phone calls from the airport when I arrive? Nope. The battery will be dead before I arrive at my destination.

And then there are the annoyances - no Flash support for the web browser, no 3G, no support for iPod games, no purchasing of music or videos over the air, the strong likelihood that you will not be able to use music as a ringtone (thanks to Cingular), and the list goes on.

None of these annoyances, or the three main issues I listed above will dissuade me from purchasing the iPhone in June. While my blog entry has mostly focused on the shortcomings of the iPhone, I can’t wait to make my first call on my brand-new iPhone!

Thoughts about SMS,

I can see why Cingular would have a huge problem with the iPhone having IP based IM service via iChat. From my perspective, it all boils down to money. Just think about it. Using iChat IM would send messages over the data subscription service which for the iPhone would be $39.99 a month for unlimited usage. So Cingular would handle all those IM messages for one price. For the most part, IM people would primarily connect you to traditional computers on non-cellular networks.

Using SMS opens your receiving community to almost every single cell phone user which is by far more people than those with IM accounts. Depending on the network and a particular plan, you could be paying say on average 5 cents per SMS message sent and the recipient 5 cents to receiver. So it cost 10 cents on average to communicate a single message over SMS.

Now, think about the average IM message. Although SMS allows up to around 250 characters per message, most messages only include less than 5 words. Carrying on a small conversation can quickly reach say 20 exchanged messages. (This may not be typically for the interfaces available on most cellphones but with something like the iPhone’s iChat UI, it will become more common). So just carrying on a single conversation that took a few minutes just made Cingular $2. Twenty of those a month and it has quickly surpassed the revenue gained from the unlimited data package.

Good point. The problem for me is convenience. I IM dozens of co-workers and only a handful of those people have any level of comfort with SMS. Using SMS as a replacement for IM won’t work for me.