Having just finished watching the Steve Jobs keynote from WWDC on the new iPhone, I'm now packing a bag for the next month I'll be waiting outside the Apple store to buy one. I waited and waited and waited, but it's time. Sure, you'll hear people grumbling about how you can't activate it at the iTunes store anymore, it still only (officially) runs on the AT&T network, and the data plan is 10 bucks more than it is currently. Yeah, those things might suck. But they're more than offset by the fact that the things that this palm-held device can now do are, simply put, amazing.
What sold me isn't any one thing that the iPhone can now do. It's how beautifully it integrates so many different kinds of things -- things are are more than a sum of its parts. Those parts are indeed neat -- the GPS, the accelerometer, the camera, the SDK -- but it's the integration where the magic happens. The iPhone now supports:
- enhanced GPS location awareness tied to social tools,
- mobile blogging with built in photo editing,
- full-featured gaming that reacts to tilting,
- medical imaging linked to Wikipedia's entries on particular body parts,
- and the list goes on.
Comments
I'm thinking about getting one too...but read Jonathan Zittrain's book The Future of the Internet...he's got a tough critique of these new closed net appliances and how they're going to choke off the generativity of the net.
- Micah Sifry
Fair point, but while the iPhone might never be as malleable or open as we might want, I'm not too worried about it because I don't see them becoming our primary machines. I'm always going to have a laptop/desktop somewhere that Steve Jobs doesn't have total dominion over, and would recommend others do too. If we want to worry, let's think about these new gaming systems -- closed, tethered, and (I think) potentially someone's only way of getting online.
- Nancy Scola
In some ways, an iPhone with a good screen & web browser is more open than say a Nokia phone with a small screen and a not so great browser. Plus now many people will be writing apps for it.
- Steve Rhodes