Reinvention + Revolution

9 January 2007

I think only Apple could have such a huge amount of hype for an unannounced product, and then manage to make a product that is even better.

The Apple iPhone

It’s truly an astonishing product.

I am just in awe at the user interface; not only is it the best mobile interface by a country mile, it’s the best computer interface I’ve seen full stop. The integration of animation into every part of the UI really makes it a huge step forward, and a preview of what we have to come in Leopard – which I’m sure we’ll see more of later this month, along with iLife/iWork ‘07.

Obviously there was no point looking at things like Leopard, or new Mac hardware in this keynote as they would have been completely overshadowed by the iPhone; even the tv (not liking the new name), which is a very interesting device has been virtually ignored.

What’s going to be most interesting to see is how open it is to developers. For a start it has built-in Safari, so it’s yet another smaller screen size that web-devs have to accommodate. It also appears to support Dashboard Widgets (which are based on the Safari rendering engine, WebKit), which opens up a huge range of possibilities. If we could develop proper applications, all the better, but just having a modern web browser is good enough these days.

As for the price, it is quite high (at $499 with a 2yr contract for the base model), but this should really come as no surprise; this is exactly the same price the iPod launched at, and expect them to follow the same model of slowly reducing the price until everybody has one.

And why would you not want one?

From: Articles

9 January 2007