Forget Harry Potter there will always be crazes and next year there will be another. Live live the King!
Its now only hours to the biggest awaited and potentially landmark event, the US launch of the iPhone. The New York Times claims that there have been over 11,000 print articles about it in the last 6 months and that it turns up about 69 million hits on Google today. Forget Wimbledon tickets, there are people are camping out in front of Apple US stores today.
Anyone who hasn’t seen it or need to understand what it has click here to visit David Pogue’s NY Times walkthrough of its features.
Let’s not dwell on it limitations, it has many. We know there will be several versions before its perfect and Apple has a good track record with the iPod of constant refinement and improvement. It may appear expensive at $500, limited in battery life, has no memory-card slot, no chat program, no voice dialling, can’t handle Java or Flash, no MSM picture swapping, text entry is a new skill that doesn’t need those trained Blackberry thumbs, and finally in the US, there is a sole AT&T network supplier and its implications.
But even in version 1.0, the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, iconic designed and importantly lifestyle-changing electronic device to come to market in years. It does so many things so well, web graphic, email, voice mail. You can enlarge text, web pages or images, rotate the screen which automatically adjusts the image to the wide views. The iPhone is also an iPod. The iPhone downloads music, videos and photos from your PC. The Google Maps module lets you view street maps or aerial photos for any address. The iPhone isn’t GPS so route directions are interactive today, in the US it gives free live traffic reporting, indicated by color-coded roads on the map.
Anyone who doubts technology convergence to the mobile and that we still need clunky tablets just to read books please leave the room as you’ve missed the plot.
