iPhone: The Day After
I was sitting in court yesterday fighting a speeding ticket as I read about the death of the greatest rumor ever thanks to MacRumors' excellent play-by-play coverage. This phone is simply amazing; lucky for me my Cingular contract is up in May, so while I'd rather have an iPhone tomorrow, the timing isn't too bad. Others have picked up on something curious though: How does 2 months of FCC approval equal a June release date?
Steve's made friends
Partnering with Yahoo for email and Google for maps is a great way to not piss anyone off. Only Steve Jobs can bring Eric Schmidt and Jerry Yang on stage within minutes of each other to talk about something they're working on together (at leas indirectly). The iPhone is revolutionary and for Apple, Yahoo and Google this is a win-win-win.
Goodbye Blackberry?
I think it's preemptive to start calling for the death of the Blackberry. We still don't know what kind of Office support iPhone will have, and without Exchange syncing its dead in the water for most corporate environments. Of course, with a full-fledged web browser on board, Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a viable, yet inelegant solution. Not to mention that the excellent 2mp camera might be a no-no for some corporate environments.
What of the iPod?
The iPhone has an "iPod" software app, a name that has been reserved for hardware (with iTunes being used for software), so what's to become of the iPod as we know it? While I'm a proponent of converged devices, 8GB is simply not enough to carry around even half of my music library, forgetting about any videos I'd like to watch on the gorgeous 3.5" screen. I predict we'll be seeing a real widescreen iPod with high-capacity sometime over the next few months. The iPod interface on the iPhone looks perfect, and we'll see that on the software side. The hardware I think will look like the iPhone with the top and bottom bezels cut off.
All in all, the iPhone isn't quite the "atomic bomb" that will wake up the U.S. cellular industry as some have said. For one, it doesn’t do 3G. After dealing with slow-as-molasses internet connectivity on my Treo, this is almost a deal breaker.
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