iPhone Friday

As most technie people will undoubtedly know, today is iPhone Friday. This is possibly the most anticipated day of the year, for some people. Personally, I don't care much for the iPhone. I don't even really care much for mobile phones as they aren't very technically elegant.

The iPhone could possibly be an interesting device, if Apple opens up the specs for it and allow 3rd party hackers to build novel consumer applications from it. Knowing Apple, this is unlikely to happen. So, I'm not too excited over the iPhone for now.

And it seems that I'm not alone. This is a picture of the Apple Store in Cincinnati minutes before it opened. Look at the crowd gathering to be among the first people to own an iPhone in the world. Precisely.

It isn't that the iPhone isn't a good product, I just question it's purpose. As a phone (ie, a device for two people to talk through) it is too over-priced and over-featured. As a PDA (ie, addressbook and schedule), it doesn't have the number of established applications and content compared to offerings from Palm/Windows. It is a device that tries to be everything but succeeds in being nothing except an over-priced gizmo. For the price of the iPhone, you can get a full featured laptop with a mobile phone.

If there is some way for Apple to tie the iPhone into the whole Apple ecosystem, it might be able to sell some. However, I don't see how it could insert itself in. To watch videos and listen to music on-the-go, we've already got the iPod. For serious computing on-the-go, we've got the MacBooks. The iPhone wasn't made for gaming on-the-go. So, dunno lar. It'll probably flop unless someone can figure out what to do with it.

*** Image from Ars ***