Top 10 things to love about the Apple iPhone

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Tim Gaden10 January 2007, 12:53 AM

Excuse me, I'm going to gush. Steve Jobs has again demonstrated that the core values of Apple -- innovation, design and attention to the end-user experience -- in a phone. I'm in love (again).

Excuse me, I'm going to gush.

It was a landmark Keynote.

It's a landmark device; a really smart smart phone!

This Keynote did more than remove the word "Computer" from Apple's company name. It demonstrated that the core values of Apple-- innovation, design and attention to the end-user experience--which have made the company's computers and music players into icons are now set to do the same for mobile phones.

I won't get my hands on an iPhone until 2008, but already I'm in love. It is the smart smart phone that people have been waiting for, a fact underscored by the 200+ patents involved in creating it.

 


 

I'm in love ten ways:

1. Smart Interaction. Finally no more lost or fiddly stylus action! Apple's Multi-Touch software makes the stylus redundant. I rate this near the top of the features to love.

2. Smart design. Sure it looks nice. What Apple product doesn't? But the real triumph is Apple's commitment to a design philosophy that it not just about looks. Thin (11.6 mm), sparse and elegant, designed so that the software and hardware work perfectly together.

3. Smart heart. The iPhone runs Mac OS X. It's hard to tell from the Keynote if it is a cut-down version or full-strength, but it promises the same intelligence, stability and elegance that I currently enjoy on my MacBook Pro.

4. Smart sensors. With three built-in sensors, the iPhone knows more about what it is doing than I do. A proximity sensor, an accelerometer that automatically switches from landscape to portrait mode and back and ambient light sensors make this more self-aware device on the market

5. Smart email. Rich HTML emails and true Blackberry-like "push" email make my Nokia E60 look like a dinosaur. This looks like a phone that it will be fun to email on, rather than a phone that you use to check your email is really, really have to.

6. Smart browsing. I've enjoyed using Opera mobile on my Nokia, but the full-strength Safari included in the new iPhone just blows it out of the water. It does really look like "the Internet in your pocket" as Steve suggests.

7. Smart headphones. Why are music phones less successful than the iPod? One of the key reasons has to be that you have to use the manufacturer’s special headphones, which you inevitably leave at home/work/in the other backpack. Phone manufacturers love the special headphones because replacements are a source of high-profit incremental revenue. Users usually hate them. Apple’s solution is special headphones that take advantage of the phone functionality but still fit into a standard headphone slot. Typical Apple elegance.

8. Smart voicemail. Steve says, "Wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to listen to five [voicemails] to get to the sixth?" Oh, yes, it would. The new visual voicemail on the iPhone lets me choose which messages to listen to. No more waiting until the phone lets me hear the one I'm interested in.

9. Smart speaker. I'm not sure what quality the built-in speaker in the iPhone will deliver, but I bet my freelancing income for the next six months that it is better than the speaker included in any other four mobile phones I've used before. Even if I leave my standard headphones at home, I'm not stuck anymore.

10. Smart integration. In a perverse way I've grown to love the nightmare of syncing my phones and hand-helds with my Mac through third-party conduits and software. Everyone loves a challenge. The iPhone will bring all that to an end with seamless integration of contacts and all the info I need.

Smart... [Dear Editor, do I really have to stop at ten?]

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David Flynn:

"It's hard to tell from the Keynote if it is a cut-down version or full-strength..."

It can't possibly be the same full-blown OS X that sits on a Mac notebook or desktop... well, not unless the iPhone has a truly massive (and I'm talking about many many hundreds of MB or more) system ROM chip, effectively equal to the size of OS X system itself on a notebook. If it was a full-strength OS X then it'd include the ability to install Photoshop, browse local servers on a network and, well, do everything that an OS X notebook or desktop could do out of the box. And there'd be no reason for an iPhone to do this.

I suspect that it's a severely stripped-back version of OS X , one that was pared right back to the Darwin core or even the XNU kernel, and then only the most absolutely necessary elements were tossed back into the pot. This would include some new stuff, such as the iPod-style interface and the rest of the UI which replaces the Finder.

Even the Widgets have got me wondering - are these the exact same widgets as on an OS X desktop or notebook? If so, then shouldn't you be able to install third-party widgets just as you do on your regular Mac? I'm wondering if in fact these aren't applets which perform the same function and have been made to look the same, but aren't in fact code-identical to an OS X widget. [Wouldn't be the first time Apple has done this -- OS X itself threw away the old Mac OS but bolted a look-alike and work-alike layer on top of an all-new OS for the sake of compatibility and familiarity.]

So for my money, this is at the most a very stripped-back OS X, or maybe (just maybe, as none of us have anything to go on apart from Jobs' keynote and his broad statement of 'it runs OS X') it could even be the barest bones of OS X plus  an OS X / iPod interface ported across to a different architecture.

But a 100% full-strength OS X? Nope. 



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Tim Gaden:

That's my hunch too.  As you point out, the big question is just how stripped back it will be. I found it hard to tell from the Keynote.  Still, I'm betting it will be smarter and more elegant that the OS which runs my Nokia. :)



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Tim Gaden:

Apple has put a lot of info and videos on the iPhone up on its web site, but the section about OS X contains more spin than substance:

"All the power and sophistication of the world’s most advanced operating system — OS X — is now available on a small, handheld device that gives you access to true desktop-class applications and software, including rich HTML email, full-featured web browsing, and applications such as widgets, Safari, calendar, text messaging, Notes, and Address Book. iPhone is fully multi-tasking, so you can read a web page while downloading your email in the background. This software completely redefines what you can do with a mobile phone."

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Anonymous:

The way I read the statement you quoted is: the function and sophistication of OS X, but not necessary the OS X itself, is available on iPhone. Even that is way too overstated I think. But I do want to get a iPhone!

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APC administrator:

Apple does actually say the operating system is OS X. Notably, though, it's not "Mac OS X", just "OS X".

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Jeff Shell:

Of course it's not full strength. That wouldn't make much sense anyways. But Jobs did mention Cocoa, Core Animation (which is very applicable for providing visual feedback in a touch environment), etc.

The user interface is different - it has to be. The menu bar doesn't work in this environment. Neither do contextual menus (at least, not as we know them), since there's no "right click". Windows Mobile / CE has similar issues, as do Linux based PDA's (are there any on the market at present?)

That said, the iPhone does have the strong core of Mac OS X and I assume many of the low level frameworks including IOKit and CoreFoundation. I also imagine that a good chunk of Cocoa is there.

While Mac OS X on the desktop is quite large and bloated, the NeXTStation ran the OS and Cocoa's ancestor on far more paltry specs: 8-32MB RAM, 105MB - 1.5GB HD. If I recall correctly, the 105MB HD configuration was a bit restricted, but that may have been limited to not being able to have the development tools.

So I'm sure that Mac OS X could be stripped of a lot of excess weight, particularly in drivers (the default install leaves behind just over 1GB of printer drivers!). The System/Frameworks folder, which includes Java and Carbon, is smaller than that. More space could be saved if some of the internationalization support (at least languages outside of target markets) is dropped. A fair amount of legacy support could also be trimmed away (old frameworks/libraries, lingering old-carbon/classic support, etc).

Just looking at what OmniDiskSweeper found, I bet you could have a pretty strong Mac OS X in a small space, especially on very specialized hardware, with fairly specialized use cases.

But again, there's the issue of UI. Cocoa is fairly adaptive. I'm hoping it will be easy for developers of apps like VoodooPad, Delicious Monster, Omni (Outliner, Plan, etc), Cha-Ching (or something like it - I used Pocket Quicken on my Palm more than any other application and would love to have something like that again), etc, etc, will have it fairly easy to port all or part of their apps to this device.

I imagine the iPhone is just the beginning. What I saw of the user interface and touch features has a lot of potential. What we saw today has to be applicable to more than just phones.

But the question does remain - just how different will it be from the desktop? And more importantly, how open will it be for developers? Hopefully they're not just limited to Dashboard widgets (although those can be fairly powerful with access to Cocoa, CoreData, etc). I hope we start hearing some more about this soon... But I imagine that there won't be too many hard details until the Developer Conference; or at least, not until Mac OS X 10.5 and XCode 3.0. I'm a bit surprised that we haven't heard more 10.5 (Leopard? I can never remember which cat we're supposed to be talking about).


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David Flynn:

That's a fantastic analysis, Jeff - thanks for sharing that! (I know, that sounded oh-so-American, but I really appreciated this detailed and highly relevant insight into the underpinnings of OS X).


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Jarrod Spiga:

I can't see how the voicemail functionality is that smart.

In order for it to randomly access any voicemail messages, all messages would have to be stored on the phone itself. I don't kn