About a week ago Steve Jobs announced the iPhone at MacWorld San Francisco. Shortly afterwards I announced that our company would be adopting this has our phone or rather “business communicator”. Since then the Internet has been abuzz with positive and negative reactions. The two big negatives are the price and the Cingular contract. One reason that is will be easy for us to adopt will be we are already Cingular customers (actually it’s now at&t ). A couple of other negatives being bounced about is that third party software will not be supported and the interface is not friendly to those who are vision impaired.

Do I think it’s expensive and out of the price range for a lot of people? Heck yeah, If you are just looking for a phone. My biggest beef is that it’s called the iPhone because that really doesn’t describe fully what it does. MacMobile would have been more suitable and I personally think it would have gotten a better reaction.

With those negatives out of the way I want to share what I love about this future device. From what I have seen it does adopt the same revolutionary ideas that made the original Macintosh computer what it was in 1984. I’m love the concepts of “visual voice mail”. Being able to literally touch a phone number on a web site to dial for example or resizing a photo just by “pinching” photo on the screen. It’s still about 5 months until it is released and I’m sure some details have not been released. What I am most interested in however is not the “coolness” of the gadget but the interface principle that it employs.

Just this past weekend I was on a walk with my wife, her sister and my nephew. While walking I was listening to some podcasts while my wife and her sister had a conversation. A few minutes into the conversation a client called and wanted to set up an appointment for me to come over and trouble shoot an issue on his computer. I fished out my iPod and went to the Calendar feature and looked and saw when I had some opening however I could not input anything. Later on I walked to some outdoor table where wireless was available and and brought out my laptop I had in the car to enter to calendar information. I then had to fish out my cellphone to call my wife and tell her where I was and in doing so I had to remove my earphones and pause the iPod. Having an all in one device in a situation like this would have made things simpler.

Technorati Tags: communications, device, iPhone

This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Internet, Portable Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.