Here’s a quick test to check your tech-savviness. What cell phone do you use? Is it an ordinary one with buttons on the front? How many times in the last six months did you use the words “Apple iPhone“? Once? Hundred times? Sadly, my friend, you are outdated.
With just a week left for the iPhone launch, it is necessary for your very survival and technological advancement that you bring yourself up to date with all things iPhone. Interestingly, this is one of the few terms that has the potential of becoming a verb like Google. So don’t be surprised if in the next few months someone asks you, “Are you iPhoned?”. Heh!
Far-fetched as it may sound, a vital fact of life today is that the Apple PR machine has been working overtime announcing various features, leaking information at opportune moments in the right places and keeping the buzz going. That there are 65,100,000 results for “iphone” in Google is testimony to this fact. And I admit that I too have been swept up in this madness. But then, again, I am merely human and not yet “iPhoned”!
So what sets this phone apart? It’s not the first phone without buttons, you know. But it is the first to announce finger gestures to browse through the phone (the first to be launched with that could well be the HTC Touch). Then there’s the outstanding design and the fact that it’s an Apple phone and their first one at that.
Do you remember such a hullaballoo over Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0 being launched? Do you know there were five versions before the most recent that were powering all your O2, I-Mate, HP and many other phones? Of course you wouldn’t because Microsoft isn’t Apple and thank god for that!
In terms of design, the iPhone will have only one button on the front facia with the rest of the navigation happening through finger gestures. Slide right to unlock, move up and down to scroll, turn the phone over sideways and you can view videos in landscape using finger gestures to activate menus and use them. The phone can be roughly divided into four main function groups: iPhone, iPod, Internet and Video.
iPhone and iPod are fairly self-explanatory: The phone has a capacity of 4GB or 8GB and you can keep storing phone numbers and other details until you run out of space. Ditto for music. Your iPhone actually becomes an iPod running iTunes. Time to junk the iPod? Perhaps.
Adding to the list of buzzwords, the iPhone is also Web 2.0 ready which means that developers can create applications for the iPhone including making a call. How much lazier can you get? An application to run an application on a device to make life easier! That’s iPhone for you!
Moving over to the Internet aspect of the iPhone, it can browse the Internet using Apple’s own browser, Safari. It can handle HTML Email, Maps, Widgets and the all-important YouTube. Which means it can handle high-speed internet connections if your service provider can offer it. Sadly for India, that a no.
Among all its features, though, the most compelling reason I feel one should buy the iPhone for, is the Mac OS X. Having migrated to the OS X on my computer a few months ago, I can’t imagine how I lived without it so far. It’s stable, scalable, looks great and works unbelievably well. The iPhone launches in the US on June 29th and will sell at $499 (4GB) and $599 (8GB). There is much debate about the proposed launch date in India and while some say it’s October 2007, others have said March 2008.
Time to ring up uncle, auntie, bhaiyya or didi in the US!
Just to round-up, the iPhone has rich HTML email, full-featured web browsing, and applications such as Safari, calendar, text messaging, Address Book, Weather, Stocks, Maps, Notes, and YouTube. And there’s the built-in (widescreen) iPod, finger gestures, coffee maker and toaster.
Okay we made up the last two, but who knows?
Photo Courtesy: Apple Store
More unnecessary salivation for an over-hyped product. Sure, maybe it’s good, but it seems to me that increasingly high-tech gadgets are purchased less for what they profess to do than the opportunity to gleefully declare others “outdated”.
Inconvenient or no, I’ll keep my “ordinary phone with buttons on the front” and my perfectly comfortable non-ipod mp3 player
From what i’ve heard , to leverage the true potential of iphone, u’ll need a carrier of the capacity of AT & T .. I doubt if anyone in India would be anywhere near that level.. It would be more of a gizmo with lots of unusable features if launched in India very soon.
Good point, Ajith. We don’t have a good enough carrier to support the phone. Let’s hope some carrier brings it with EDGE or 3G.