Apple announced the all-new iPhone this week amidst much fanfare and rhetoric about "revolutionary new mobile phone". I hold Apple to high standards in innovation and this product announcement came in as a big disappointment. iPhone, stripped of all rhetoric, is just a wi-fi palmtop computer with a cellular half-modem (MacModems?) bundled with a cellular broadband service. Will it meet the same fate as Newton?
Many communication features, touted in the demo, have been around for a very long time and some (like threaded view of SMS) are incremental innovations. How does making a call automatically by selecting an address book entry become a "revolutionary" feature? It has been around for ages. A 2-megapixel camera is hardly something to rave about these days.
Cellphones have been around for many years now and enough use cases are available to create truly innovative phones. How many times have we been annoyed by cellphones ringing during inappropriate moments? How many times have we looked at our cellphone to check our current location? How many times have we had to answer "Where are you now?" over a cellphone and wished we knew? How about those calls from pesky telemarketers who keep calling you repeatedly? Ever wished your phone could speak out caller id instead of ringing while driving?
iPhone would be revolutionary if only it could screen calls with whitelists (announce only calls from a select group), blacklists (dont let these calls through), timed "sleep" (do not disturb for next x minutes), announce callers while watching video or shooting photos but delay it to end of track while listening to music. Then I can attend meetings in peace and block out those pesky callers. If it had a GPS receiver, I could sms my co-ords while requesting a taxi, seeking directions in an online map or simply letting someone know where I am. While driving, I could use voice control to take a call in speaker mode without taking my hands off the wheel.
iPhone has wi-fi and broadband but doesn't come with a VoIP service like Skype. This is a huge omission. I hope they open up the software stack for third-party developers. I dont see how the platform can survive for long without software extensions. The symmetric rectangular form factor is suited for a palmtop computer but not a phone. It is so easy to get it upside down when responding to call. Handheld devices are tested for feel and orientation. Did Apple get so bowled over by the landscape mode that they let this slip by? Soft buttons and lack of voice control will exclude visually impaired folks. The high-resolution screen is nice for photos and movies but will be a big strain on the eyes for reading text. It should be good for reading scanned visiting cards.
iPhone announcement was not a total dud. The idea of using a pinching action to zoom in and out is really revolutionary. The "pinch" breaks the implicit notion that a touch screen is just for pointing. Back in 1960s, when mainframes processed jobs in batches, Ivan Sutherland invented direct interaction with his Sketchpad system and pioneered many of the graphical interfaces that we take for granted today. It is good to see this line of innovation still being pursued in Apple.
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