Long Nguyen

iPhone

I’m not going to comment on the iPhone per se. A whole lot of websites and blogs have already done that and I don’t believe I can do it any better than they did. All I am going to say about it is go get your own opinion by watching the iPhone introduction. It’s awesome.

Ringtones
I just read this article that points out that the iPhone will cause that industry to die based on the fact that we could the songs on the iPhone as ringtones. The author seems to have missed the fact that most all the phones on the market today give the ability to set any song as a ringtone, so I am failing to see the link with the ringtone industry. I didn’t even know that there was a ring tone industry, when I put a ring tone, I always transfer the mp3 file to my phone and use it as a ring tone.

Smartphone or not?
My answer to that is that it doesn’t matter. Everybody is going to refer to it as a phone anyways. Today, people refer to so-called smartphones as phones all the time. So, terminology is not important.

But just to clarify things, in a nutshell, a smartphone is a device that combines the functionality of a phone and a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). The iPhone certainly does that and probably better than most. It has contacts, calendar, photos, music, video, bluetooth, wifi, camera, and sensors.

Engadget has released an article saying that The iPhone is not a smartphone. I can only reply to that that it’s indeed not a smartphone, but it’s simply a “smarterphone”.

The one drawback I see about the iPhone is that I haven’t seen any hint of anything that allows to write notes or to-do lists. Maybe it’s there, maybe it’s not, but it’s an important feature of smartphones and even phones.

Cost
The reasoning behind the cost makes sense. The iPod costs about $200 and a phone/smartphone costs about $300, so the iPhone costs $500 even though it does all the same things, but it does them better.

To me, the best part is wifi. That means not having to pay the mobile phone company for data transfers which means a lot of browsing with disregard to costs.

Conclusion
I am definitely attracted to this product, but I am not sure if I will buy it when it comes out. I get the feeling that it is better to wait for the following generation which will probably be greatly improved just like all improvement made on the iPod after the first (i.e.: the four buttons were eliminated leaving only the clickwheel).

Filed by Long at January 10th, 2007 under Apple, Gadgets