Download the Scoble Show and go to the 8 minute marker to hear Jonathan (CEO of Sun Microsystems) talk about the iPhone and how he told Steve Jobs that it would be a lot better if he could use the Gmail for Mobile J2ME application on it.
Does the world really need another blog post about the iPhone? Probably not, but I just can’t resist it. I tried really hard for the last couple of weeks.
There are two questions about the iPhone that I am interested in:
Is it a good phone?
What impact will it have on the Mobile industry?
Christian Lindholm has posted some great thoughts about the first one:
“In my view a phone is a one hand operated device which can be used while moving. While moving users seldom have both hands free. They drive, carry bags, open doors, push prams. Most mobile phones have been designed around this premise for a couple of decades. Due to human ergonomics phones have thumb operated UI’s. Now Steve Jobs proposes to revolutionize the phone with an index finger operated UI. This is a two hand operated device, worst case an inferior phone.”
I think he is spot on. While I really, really love the “pinch” gesture to zoom in and out of photos, I want to see someone doing it while holding on to a pint of beer, standing in a pub. Pick your favourite social context here.
Of course, the rule of thumb operation, excuse the pun, is also true for the iPod. Steve Jobs made a big point during the keynote about the click-wheel being a revolutionary interface. So why then is he abandoning this great, thumb operated, interface on the iPhone for something that requires scrolling with the index finger? This makes no sense. A wheel-style interface is the best way to scroll through long lists, e.g. of artists on the iPod or email messages on the Blackberry. I would be surprised if the iPhone UI can really compete here. (As an aside, this where the Nokia E61/2 really fail in my opinion. The five-way navi-key is great for browsing through a few items, but try scrolling through a list of 100 emails.)
Another thing that struck was the demo that Jobs gave of sending an email to Phil Schiller. The goal was to demonstrate how easy it was to type with the virtual keyboard. Again, he used one index finger to do this, as his other hand was busy holding the phone. I could not help thinking that this was “easy”, as defined by an elderly gentleman. Any teenager could have tripple-tap’ed the same text on a standard 12 key phone in a fraction of the time it took Jobs to write it. Sure, at $499 teenagers might not be the target demographic, but it strikes me that they are perhaps not so much in need of a UI revolution as Apple might think.
So is the iPhone a good phone? I don’t know. It is impossible to tell until it ships. But I have my doubts. Over the last few days, people who wrote anything critical about the device usually said at some point or another that they still really want one. Well, and this might be a first, I don’t. At least I will not spend any money on it. Gifts are, of course, welcome. I am currently carrying three devices with me during the day that the iPhone competes with: a Blackberry, an N73 and an iPod nano. Every device is really, really good at what it does and I see no reason to replace any of them with a device that can’t beat them on their home turf. Yes, you can chop vegetables and open a can with a Swiss Army knife, but why would you?
Now with regards to the second question, this is a totally different story. No matter how good the device turns out to be in the end, it will have a big impact on the industry. And that is certainly a good thing.
This has been a pretty eventful year for my family and me. It has also been the first full year in which I have blogged more or less regularly, writing a total of 56 posts. This makes it a lot easier to look back and remember the highlights of the past 12 months.
A pretty good year I think. Hope you are happy with yours, too.
Anybody who is firmly opposed to the death penalty, like myself, will feel that the execution of Saddam yesterday was wrong. It was not, as the Australian Prime Minister suggested, a sign of a mature and confident iraqi state, but, like any execution, an act of self-righteous barbarism. Yes, Saddam was probably a monster, but that is not an excuse.
Update: As usual my friend Andrew finds better words than me.
As planned I went out yesterday to get myself a brand new shiny X Series N73 from the 3 Store. I only have a month or so left on my existing Orange contract, but am so incredibly irritated by their terrible customer service and outrageous data charges that I had to make the jump straight away.
So, first impressions are excellent! The buying experience was great, the people in the store super friendly. The X Series comes in Gold or Silver package at either £10 or £5. The Gold package allows you to use your phone for the really high bandwidth stuff: Streaming video via Orb, or from your Sling box. On top of that you need to sign up for a minimum of 12 months to a 3 contract. I went for the cheapest option, which gives me 300 minutes and 150 texts for £25. I will never come close to reaching any of these limits. For the data I went with the Gold package, because I like the idea of being able to watch live TV on my mobile. Not sure if I will ever use it, but it sounded like a funky idea. Also, 3 offers a great deal on the Sling box, which you can buy from them for £99, instead of the usual £179. So I got that as well :)
The N73 came with a 512MB mini SD card and worked straight away. It is configured with quite a nice theme and all the big branded services promoted prominently on the device. I have not yet found any features of the device that have been disabled or removed, which is a pleasant surprise, since some operators excel at crippling perfectly good phones.
Some of the pushed services like ebay, Yahoo! Search and Orb are actually just shortcuts that open the browser and take you to an XHTML page. Yahoo! Go, Slingplayer, MSN Messenger and Skype are native Symbian C++ clients. But actually none of these interest me particularly, so the first thing I did was install Shozu, Gmail and Google Maps, because these are the apps I expect to use every day. All of them installed without problems and work beautifully. Using data services on your phone is so much more fun when you know that you are on an unlimited data plan. Now, a note of caution, the data is actually limited by a fair use policy of 5000 Skype minutes, 10,000 MSN Messenger messages and 80 hours of Sling/Orb streaming per month, plus 1GB for all other data services. Pretty generous, but technically not unlimited. Still, pretty good for £10. Also worth noting is that Skype calls made from abroad are subject to roaming charges. This is a bit cheeky, but there you go.
I could not resist starting up Yahoo! Go, since it has been a while since I used it and it was such a poor product when it first launched. Annoyingly, I have to admit that Yahoo! has certainly managed to polish most of the rough edges away. It now almost feels and looks like a single, coherent application. But then again I only set up the Address Book sync since I have no use for the other services.
I have not yet had the time to set up the Sling box. It is certainly the ugliest piece of hardware ever designed. Whoever came up with and/or approved that design should be fired and possibly shot. Looking at it makes me want to vomit. Luckily though it doesn’t really have any form of user interface, so you can just hide it behind a cupboard, inside a box or, preferably pull up some floorboards, stick it in there and forget about it.
I did try streaming some video from my laptop with Orb to my phone. Since Orb only runs on Windows, I had finally found a reason to boot my MacBook under XP. It was actually quite scary when I signed into the Orb service on my phone and was staring straight at myself. The software had picked up the built in iSight on the MacBook and there I was. The video streamed at 37 KBits which really did not allow for anything other than a lightly animated newscast maybe. There was also a delay of about 15 seconds, at least when watching myself on the webcam. But still fun to do.
OK, off to set up that Sling box now.
We have finally got the planning approval for our proposed extension and modernisation. The letter from the planning office only places some very light restrictions on our development. Now it is just a question of getting the builder to get started. A minor challenge :)
My former colleague Murray has posted this very funny photo set on Flickr. Make sure to read the descriptions. You might not think it is funny. Guess you needed to be there. I will be bidding on some items.
Congratulations to 3 for doing the right thing and launching a true flat rate data plan in the UK. What can I say but “About fucking time!”. Yes, T-Mobile has been pushing the boat out quite a bit with their ‘unlimited’ Web-n-Walk plan, but of course that excludes VoIP, Video, P2P filesharing and generally anything that consumes LOTS of data. I am particularly pleased that it is the pioneers of 3G that have finally seen the light, because they have been such stubborn proponents of a business model where the operator controls all the services that people have access to. Of course, back then they didn’t know about The Long Tail ;)
3 has not yet announced how much the xseries plan will cost but it almost does not matter. My current operator Orange charges £88.13 for unlimited data. I mean, what on earth is the £0.13 all about? Is this some marketing trick to make me think that it is really the lowest they can possibly go? Do they want me to think that a dozen business analysts with Harvard MBAs banged their heads together over a weekend, but that is the best they could come up with? They are clearly having a laugh. So, no matter what 3 will charge, and I think it would be fair to expect it to be something in the £4.99-9.95 range, I will get one of those N73s as soon as they come out (first thing to do though is uninstall Yahoo! Go ;)
We are expanding further! Hurrah! Launch is scheduled for late May 2007.
Well, not quite. On Sunday we moved out of our house to make room for some building work to kick off. The idea was to do all the plumbing, put in a new heating system, install the new bathroom upstairs and a few other bits. Basically do all the things that do not require planning permission so that we can survive the winter in the house. This was only going to take 2-3 weeks. Right.
Good idea, except that when we pulled down the ceilings, insulation and plaster it became clear that we would need to put in several new steel beams to support the loft floor for later conversion and, more shockingly, that the timber forming the front elevation of the house is mostly rotton and will need to be replaced. That means taking off a huge part of the outside wall and essentially rebuilding it. Nice.
In an instant the size of the luxury garden office I had planned shrunk from a nice 3×3m glass enclosed space to a shoebox with a plastic window.
Oh, and there is no way on earth, according to our (excellent) builder that we will spend Christmas in our house. Staying with Beth’s sister is a bit like a luxury holiday (she has heating!) but I am not sure how long she will cope with the invasion by our little family.
