MacWorld San Francisco 2007

Or “Why I stuck with a cheap, shitty phone all these years instead of getting a RAZR.”

By now I’m used to the heckles I get from friends and family regarding my sticking with a Samsung SGH-X475 for the last few years instead of upgrading to any of the newer “whiz-bang” phones that keep coming out, like the Motorola RAZR.

My phone doesn’t have a camera. Or bluetooth. It doesn’t have MP3 ringtones. It would get online if I were willing to shell out the cash, but who wants to use T-Mobile’s browser? When people send me pictures to my phone, I have to log on to a web site to look at them (which I never do because it’s a pain in the ass) and then they disappear after a few days. About the most it can do is make phone calls and send/receive SMS messages. The paint is all but scratched off because I keep it in the same pocket as my keychain.

It’s a commodity phone. I got it because at the time I needed a replacement phone, but I didn’t see any point to spending a whole lot of money on a more full-featured phone. I spent $80 on it. I sent away for the $30 rebate on it years ago but never received my rebate. Even then it was probably still overpriced.

This ain’t your daddy’s MacWorld

Two years ago I said that “[w]aking up the afternoon of the MacWorld Keynote is a bit like waking up on Christmas morning, but better.” This year was probably the best yet.

During the keynote, as you’ve no doubt heard by now, Apple introduced the much ballyhooed iPhone to an enthusiastic crowd. Later that evening, I watched the keynote for myself, and all I can say is “wow”. It looks so much better than how people thought it would, that it really shows you what Apple means when they say “Think Different.”

What a beautiful device. It’s absolutely stunning. I knew that Jony Ive and his team of industrial designers would know how to a gorgeous and easy-to-use smartphone, but this just blows me away.

Even if I hadn’t been already planning on getting one, I would still want one. Since the first rumours started a few years ago, I’d decided that I was going to wait, no matter how long it took, for Apple to release a mobile phone before I finally bought something more than strictly utilitarian. I’d also said the same thing about getting a PDA, opting to wait until an Apple PDA was released. The hopes of a PDA were eventually dashed, however, but still I held on for that phone.

Now it’s looking as though the wait was worth it, and then some. The iPhone is not just amazing; it’s revolutionary. It’s stuff like this that really makes me feel like I’m living in The Future. This is amazing stuff, if you really think about it. Your phone, your music, feature-length movies and the Internet; an entire computer in your pocket. Visual Voicemail is going to be a complete paradigm shift in how we deal with voicemail. The things iPhone can do — and the way that it does them — have never existed before in this combination of high functionality and high usability. Even though I’d expected them to name it “iPhone”, it seems almost the wrong name for it. WIth all of the things that it can do, I think that this device deserves the name “iPod” more than the actual iPod does. Whether or not you like Macs is inconsequential; this is now the best phone, the best PDA and the best iPod on the market.

The overall interface of the thing makes me wonder even more about what the GUI of Leopard is going to look like. If it starts looking more like the iPhone, I wouldn’t complain.

It seems almost clear, now, what Apple’s been up to these past ten years. Widgets, the scrolling trackpads on PowerBooks, the miniature iSights that fit into notebook monitors, the accelerometers in PowerBooks, the ambient light sensor in iMacs, the patents — many of these could likely be the result of the things they were learning when trying to develop the iPhone. But, as always, the full picture is never revealed to us.

Already the FUD from other mobile manufacturers has begun pouring in. One thing is clear: this is the year that everything’s been building towards. All the manoeuvrings between Apple and Microsoft (and all of Apple’s other competitors) are about to culminate into one giant bid on Apple’s part to expand their market like the initial expansion of the universe.

Ah, so that’s why it’s called the Cult of Mac.

Safari

From what we’ve seen, the iPhone version of Safari is just fantastic. It all but eliminates the idea of a “Mobile Web” that’s somehow separate from the “normal” Web. And it’s page management is so much cooler than tabbed browsing. I wish zooming on the desktop version was that elegant, but then that would require Macs with multi-touch monitors. (Some day…)

Already I’m really curious about how Safari on the iPhone works. Will it use your site’s “screen” or “handheld” media types? How will pages flow to fit the small screen? Does it do RSS? Will there be a way to use plugins with it? We know it will sync with your Safari bookmarks on your desktop, but how will its bookmark management be? It’s clearly too early to tell, but already I’m looking forward to finding out.

Widgets

The widgets were a surprise, although in hindsight they should have been obvious. In a way, this is better than a PDA. If there’s a way to install new widgets, the abilities of the iPhone can be extended to the point where you could do pretty much anything you’d want to do with it. Even those of you who don’t like Dashboard or just don’t use it have to admit that widgets are perfect for a device like the iPhone.

Imagine running a Skype widget (that doesn’t suck, unlike the current one) on your iPhone — you’d be able to make voice calls anywhere in the world, for free, on your mobile phone. The Dictionary widget would be pretty great to have, too. Think about Mint on the go, or even Delicious Library. I don’t know how wireless works on the iPhone, so who knows if we’d need a stumbler widget? Of course, this all assumes that we’ll be able to add widgets to it somehow; hopefully we will. It would make this thing truly groundbreaking.

But enough of me waxing poetic about the thing. As much as I love Apple’s products, I’ve never thought that any of them were “perfect”. And this includes the iPhone.

Price

You know what? I lied. I actually don’t mind the price. Years ago, I bought Apple’s then-top-of-the-line iPod (40GB) for $400. I just wish the iPhone could replace that iPod completely. (I have an iTunes library that currently weighs in at 33.8GB.) I suppose that’s as good of an upgrade path as any, though.

I think that anyone who points to the high price of the iPhone (or the fact that you need a computer to use it) as a harbinger of failure might need to brush up on their history.

Syncing

If it has Bluetooth, why doesn’t it sync with your Mac wirelessly? Didn’t Steve demonstrate wireless syncing between phones and your Mac over Bluetooth years ago? The dock is nice, but it seems to me that all it should really be, functionally speaking, is a nicely-designed power cradle. The answer probably lies in Bluetooth adoption; I don’t know anyone who actually uses Bluetooth for anything other than wireless headsets. (Meaning not on their computer.)

At least it does sync, though. This will be one of those times that I’m glad I’ve been an Address Book user since it came out.

Cingular

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t mind switching to Cingular. But what about Canada? There’s no Cingular in Canada. I asked a Cingular phone representative if I would be able to sign up for Cingular service if I was living in Canada, and she said “no”. We’ve been told that the iPhone will be available in the U.S. in June, and Europe and Asia in late 2007, but what about Canada? Will iPhone even be available in Canada at all?

Incidentally, the CEO of Cingular looked like a chump reading from those cards. Doesn’t he know there’s no cue cards in Apple keynotes?

Email

As soon as he said “full HTML“, I cringed. Given how poorly Mail.app’s built-in spam blocker has been doing lately with all these ‘attached image’ spam messages, and no announcement of an improved spam blocking AI in sight, I forsee the iPhone’s memory being quickly filled with JPEG files whose contents advertise stock tips and “generic V1agra and Ci@lis!” Add to that push-IMAP and you have a serious problem, all thanks to junk email.

Speaking of push-IMAP, why was there no mention of push-IMAP for .Mac? Come to think of it, why was there no mention of .Mac at all? Wouldn’t the iPhone be the perfect value-add for a service that has taken a lot of heat since it became a paid service? It’s just fishy, if you ask me.

All in all, though, the iPhone is a groundbreaking device, and I can’t wait to get my hands on one.