Take a look at the LifeDrive then look at the iPhone. Similar, aren't they? Palm could have taken the LifeDrive with its huge screen, "one button" (okay, a five-way pad).. built-in WiFi, and turned it into a Palm "iPhone" a long time ago. Although Apple's market share of computers is tiny, they totally dominate the portable music player market and everyone and his monkey makes an iPod wannabee. Like someone said earlier, everyone knows what an iPod is. How much of the population knows what a Treo is?
After watching Steve Jobs' hour and a half long iPhone presentation on apple.com yesterday I thought to myself "this thing is pure sex." His hyperbole about being "five years ahead of everyone else" is typical marketing baloney, but it is a very compelling device. But the problems are still there. It'll be a Cingular exclusive for some number of years. My Treos are on Sprint. I don't want or need a Cingular plan with yet another monthly bill. The iPhone seems to have no card slot; sure it has a ton of internal memory but if I recorded an .mp4 with my Neuros recorder and wanted to play it on an iPhone, I'd have to suck it off the Neuros' SD card with a computer, then dock the iPhone and copy it over with iTunes. Bleah. With a Treo, I can literally yank the card out of the Neuros and shove it in the Treo and play a full-length movie or anything else I've recorded
The iPhone runs MacOS X but does it run programs other than what comes built into it? Or is it a closed system that's just a sub-set of MacOS X?
That huge screen looked pretty glossy. With operation totally limited to your fingertips, is it going to get covered with finger prints or will there be a huge aftermarket in anti-glare matte-finish screen protectors for it and how will it behave with a screen protector?
You gotta hand it to Steve Jobs. Whatever else he might be, he sure knows how to play to a crowd. If you watch the iPhone keynote, compare his on-stage personna with those of the other company suits who come up on stage.
If Cingular offered the iPhone with JUST a data plan (which I'm sure they won't..) .. or a tiny, cheap 100 minutes a month voice plan with unlimited data at a reasonable price, ($50.00 a month or less..) .. I'd seriously consider getting one despite my promise to myself that after Jobs killed off the Newton in 1998 he'd never get a cent out of me
And when he was showing off the iPod features of the iPhone and brought up Sgt. Pepper's and played a couple tracks, I thought to myself what irony - Apple Corps. Ltd., the Beatles' company, sued Apple Computers over the name Apple a long time ago. And there's Steve Jobs showing off his new gizmo in front of four thousand people with Beatles' music.
And how about that prank call to Starbucks?
Harv