Like everyone else in the geekosphere, I was vicariously attending MacWorld through all those Mac rumour sites as well as Twitter. Unsurprisingly, the iPhone has a lot of people excited.
Jason Kottke got so excited, he immediately whipped up a cardboard scale model of the iPhone. Jeff Croft is really excited that the iPhone is running Leopard.
A lot of people are talking about how to get their heads around this thing. Is it a phone or is it a PDA? John Allsopp wouldn’t mind losing the phone functionality altogether.
Mike Davidson thinks that the iPhone is worthy of the moniker Steve’s Amazing New Device. He must be pretty pleased that his prediction that Apple would no longer be just a computer company became reality with the official change of the company’s name. Khoi Vinh, on the other hand, will be disappointed to hear that the iPhone does indeed use iTunes to do its syncing.
I spent part of the keynote chanting Get to the web browsing! Get to the web browsing!
Then Steve Jobs got to the web browsing… with expando-Safari.
Dave Hyatt may be slightly biased but he thinks that this may spell the beginning of the end for a separate mobile web. Dan Cederholm is pretty impressed too. Cameron Moll, on the other hand, believes that the iPhone won’t revolutionise the mobile web landscape for most people. Brian Fling disagrees. He thinks the impact of the iPhone will be huge.
Bursting Apple’s reality distortion field with Photoshop, Jon Hicks demonstrates the problem with the iPhone’s screen. Roger Johansson also throws a cold bucket of reality on proceedings when he asks where the tactile feedback is supposed to come from when there’s no keyboard. That’s a valid concern according to David Pogue’s hands-on experience.
The biggest downer probably won’t be anything to do with the device itself but the lock-in with some crappy provider, as Dave Shea explains. That’s still not enough to dissuade Jason Santa Maria from wanting an Apple mobile device.
I met up with Brighton’s own mobile guru, Tom Hume, for lunch today. He’s taking a pragmatic and somewhat pessimistic approach with his thoughts on the iPhone.
Only time will tell how Apple’s baby will fare once its released into the wild. For some historical perspective, I invite you to cast your mind back to a Slashdot article from 2001 announcing the iPod.