iPhone Madness

It’s only been two weeks since the iPhone was announced and it has already been praised, lambasted, and emulated. I think that’s a new record of some sort. The run up to the actual announcement was more rumor and speculation than has preceded any recent Apple product to my recollection.

Since the announcement the internets seem to have exploded in a flurry of excitement and anger. For some people the iPhone is more than they exer expected it to be while others see it as not living up to their own personal hype. I think it’s a pretty impressive little device if it works as advertised. It’s not necessarily reinventing the idea of a mobile phone but instead changing how they’re used. I’ve been in the market for a new phone since I got my first cell phone. None I’ve seen to date have really impressed me. Every time I find one with cool features it’s almost invariably gigantic. Svelt and sexy phones either lack any useful features besides calling or have software interfaces designed by sadists.

I got to lay my beady little eyes on one at MacWorld, they are very nice looking devices. They’re pretty small, easily comparable to other phones of the same class. The Multi-touch interface looks interesting as it is extensible as the software can possibly be, very Star Trek. During the Stevenote it was mentioned that the iPhone will be running OSX which has been backed up by various Apple VPs in subsequent interviews. This is a really interesting point to me. It’s likely OSX with a highly trimmed environment. Despite assertions to the contrary it’s actually not that difficult to trim OSX’s application stack. Few components of the system have cross-dependencies. As long as the base system is intact everything else is pretty pluggable. The hardware at this point hasn’t been discussed but is widely speculated on.

I may end up buying one eventually. I’m not thrilled about the Cingular lock-in but it does make sense for the type of product the iPhone is supposed to be. Nokia has some nice competition in the form of the E61 and some more interesting stuff in the chute. What I hope the iPhone ends up doing is raise the bar for other phone manufacturers like the iPod has with MP3 players. The cell phone industry has needed a huge kick in the ass for a long time. Currently companies are only really replacing last year’s products with slightly improved versions. There’s few if any radical leaps forward, until now.