Agylen

Today His Steveness finally unveiled the long awaited iPhone and once more left the world gasping in awe and wondering how can a company be so consistently innovative and miles above and beyond the competition.

Excuse me if I let myself be totally swept away into Job’s Reality Distortion Field, but this iPhone is such a thing of beauty that is leaving me completely helpless. It’s not just that it’s probably the smart phone with the best user interface around (we still need to verify how good the multi-touch, but I don’t think Apple can blow it). It’s also not just that it’s a wide-screen video iPod too.

What really blows my socks off about it is the fact that it’s running OS X! Can you imagine it? Not some brain-damaged or crippled OS like Symbian or WinCE, but OS X. And it’s got Safari, of course. A real browser, not a joke like the Symbian browser or Opera Mini, and with that screen resolution, you can really browse almost any website. If you ever tried browsing the web with a typical smartphone, you know that most sites are actually off-limits. And it’s got Wi-Fi too!

Does the fact that it is running OS X mean that most Mac applications will run on it unchanged? This is not clear, but I see no reason why this shouldn’t be the case. What follows from this is that thousands of desktop-class applications will immediately be available on the iPhone. Can you say “great mobile platform”? I knew you could.

No wonder that shares of RIMM and PALM are plummeting through the floor today. Would you buy a Blackberry or a Treo if the iPhone were available today?

And would you buy a Zune? If there’s one thing that the iPhone is not is…brown ;).

To be honest, the only thing that the iPhone lacks is more memory. 8GB is not that much if you want to carry around lots of music, videos and a great deal of applications and associated data. Let’s just hope that by the time it actually becomes available, advances in Flash memory density bring us a 16GB model, at least.

Finally, I cannot close this post without a mention of the other product that was announced today. The Apple TV is a great product, but its importance risks being overshadowed by the much sexier iPhone. It would be much sexier if my friends at The Venice Project could port the Venice client to it ;).

Update: Looks like it won’t be as open a platform as I had hoped, which is a pity, and tends to cool my enthusiasm a little bit. It’s still probably the best iPod ever (minus the tiny memory size) and a cool gadget for mobile Web and email access, but not such a revolution. However, this is just the first version, so I guess it’s better to wait and see.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, macworld, stevejobs, keynote, osx, appletv, convergence, rimm, blackberry, palm, treo, symbian, theveniceproject.

I’ve never been fond of gadgets, but this it seems like this is starting to change. Must be a side-effect of having switched to the Mac. First a new digital camera, then an iPod and now a smartphone.

I’ve always used cellphones for … well, placing and receiving phone calls, and nothing else. But now, with Bluetooth-enabled laptop and desktop computers, plus iSync, I figured I could do more.

The occasion presented itself when it dawned on me that, as we’re leaving for Mexico next week, we need a tri-band cellphone if we want to be able to call from there without being forced to use the hotel’s lines (and be screwed by them) or public phones.

So, I went shopping for a tri-band phone and after asking a couple of friends for advice, I bought a Nokia 6630. Now I’m the proud owner of a phone that has more connectivity options (SM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/WCDMA/BT/USB) than a laptop of not many years ago, which is fine as I plan to travel significantly more than I did in the past.

Maybe I’ll become a true mobile geek like Russell and start blogging about all the cool stuff that you can do with a Symbian phone. I’ve already got it to sync with my iMac, but not with the Powerbook. Apparently, the version of iSync that is in Panther does not support this phone, whereas the latest update for Tiger work fine. Time to upgrade the Powerbook, I guess.

I also did some web surfing. I had imagined that UMTS would be much much faster, but it’s actually pretty slow, at least in this area.

On a closing note, I put Nokia Smartphone Hacks on my Amazon.com wishlist. I guess that if you hold in your hand a machine with the power of a supercomputer, you’d better get the most out of it.