Hopeless Geek

After talking to people that waited for them and reading around the web, here’s some of the things that are coming to light for me that make me a little happier to have waited:

• No phone-to-phone Bluetooth for file/photo/contact transfers. If I take a photo, I can’t just fire it off to you. I have to email it.
• No MMS. Again, no way to get a photo off of this outside of email or sync.
• No custom ringtones. Rumor has it that’s coming from the iTS and you’re going to have to buy it. You can’t take music you already have licensed (“bought”) and use it and you can’t even make your own from you screaming into the microphone (music might be playing in the background!).
• No GPS. I mean, really, my Katana (Sprint) has it. WTF? That would be killer for Google Maps and a host of other things. Think about features such as having a DotMac service on your iPhone that uploads your position now and again (with privacy controls). Scary? Well, now imagine being a parent, if you’re not. Sprint offers just this feature, as do other providers, but the iPhone can’t participate because it doesn’t have GPS, a small and simple addition. This also enhances a ton of other services like, oh … 911.
• No way to use it as an Internet connection for your computer (ie. either dial out or use the data network). My Katana (Sprint) can dial out, and RAZRs (AT&T) can share the GPRS connection with a Mac over Bluetooth. The iPhone can’t do either.
• No voice recognition, not even voice prints. No “call home” here.
• The headphone jack can’t take a fair number of headphones. You know, for an iPod, that’s pretty fucking stupid. Well, you could donate another $20 to get the “iPhone TTY Adapter” which is the supposed solution to the problem. Somewhere I read of a cheaper and clumsier solution from Belkin for this, but I cannot find the link. Belkin’s adapter is $9.95 and the semi-offical solution. Apple’s does something else and does not moonlight as a solution for this.

So, am I being too harsh? With all the advances this gadget brings to the table in terms of UI, are these deal-killer features? It depends on what you see iPhone as. Do you see it as an iPod with some phone functionality, which is strictly how Jobs sold it? Or do you see it as a smart phone with iPod functionality, which is how a large number of people are interpreting the marketing and hype?

I see it as an iPod — the foundation for all future iPods, in fact — that has a phone integrated into it. As such, I’m neither surprised nor terribly saddened that those features I like to use in my current phone are completely absent in a phone that retails for twice as much (after all, it does do much more than twice as much in other areas). It’s really just a full-featured iPod with $150-worth of phone slapped on top (and a tenth of the storage of that full-featured iPod). It’s not the perfect phone, nor was it meant to be. That’s understandable. The problem is that some of the things I’m used to having — and using — in a phone, are absent.

I’m partially sold. I’m really going to pay attention to software updates and wait for a Revision B to come out in the next year or so and see how it goes. I have absolutely no doubts that the playing field just saw a titan walk out of the locker room and head right for them, but how everyone reacts to the event is going to be the real show and the real thing to watch for. Specifically: how will Nokia and Motorola respond?