Good Timing For the iPhone

I’m a little undecided about whether I think Apple’s new iPhone is something I’d want or not. It has many obvious things going for it, but a number of negatives that I don’t like.

For one, it only goes up to 8 GB of storage. This isn’t going to be able to replace your existing MP3 player for most people, which means you still have a high-capacity MP3 player in addition to what you can fit on your iPhoto.

They don’t have any photo samples, but you can assume that it’s not going to replace a real camera or anything like that.

I’m very surprised that it doesn’t include GPS. They highlight the map application it has, but it’s just a more responsive version of what I can already go with Google Maps on my old Blackberry. If you added in GPS, that would become a much more useful application.

I’m also a little unsure about that soft keyboard. I don’t have the biggest hands and fingers in the world, but those keys look pretty tiny even to me. They don’t seem to be arguing that they’re not, showing people making tons of fat-fingered typos in their demos, but they’re relying on the built-in correction features to fix that all up instead. We’ll have to wait and see how that works in the real world.

And absolutely no mention of my biggest complaint with iPods, that they don’t do gapless playback. It’s the main reason that I don’t have an iPod now (well, that and the piss-poor iPod battery life — something like 6 hours, I think — when I was shopping for MP3 players, plus the restrictive software, plus the short list of formats, etc.) If this does gapless playback, it’s definitely more appealing.

But then for me, this is great timing on Apple’s part. Just today I was typing something up on my Blackberry while riding the subway in to work, when the Blackberry spontaneously rebooted itself. The last 15 minutes of typing was all lost. I have no idea why that happened. All I can assume is that it sensed the iPhone introduction coming up somewhere in the world, and was using all its energy to try to kill its competition off before it could be launched.

Nice try, Blackberry, but no cigar for you. You lost what I was writing, and so I don’t like you any more. Well, and your incredibly slow performance. Ever try to do something else on a Blackberry while you’re loading a web page in the background? Yikes.

But still, I’m undecided. It’s not going to replace my MP3 player or camera, so it’s really just a slicker version of my Blackberry. And RIM already makes slicker version of my Blackberry, so there’s already competition there. And the iPhone is probably going to be much more expensive than the Blackberry…

Who knows. Just rambling. Those are my thoughts for now. I’ll have to actually play with one and listen to other peoples’ experiences before deciding anything, of course.