Tethered Swimming

“How innovative.  I like it.” – Martin Prince

“Hey Dolph, take a memo on your Newton.  Beat up Martin.” – Kearney

Today I’d like to poke a little fun at the iPhone and the wretched masses that seem ready to follow it off a cliff.  It is a very slick phone, no doubts there, but the Motorola Razor, excuse me, Razr, was also a very slick phone once upon a time.  Now you can get one free for renewing a service contract.  A similar fate probably awaits Apple’s latest darling invention.

Having finally seen and played with one up close, I can attest that it is as cool as the ads make it look.  The menus scroll crisply and obediently.  The video playback is clear and bright.  The screen is quite scratch resistant, at least so far.  The on-screen keyboard that pops up for typing corrects the errors you make more or less on the fly.  The iPhone acts like it wants to do what you tell it to and the graphics move like they’ve got a purpose.  It’s light and has the solid, compact feel one expects from quality electronics.

The primary selling point of this $500 marvel seems to be that little “i” in front of the capitalized “P”.  That, boys and girls, is called marketing and it was done to perfection in this case.  The larger screen and the lack of a keyboard are certainly sexy, but for all the hoopla the iPhone is still just a telephone.  I’ll grant that it is a telephone with some very nifty bells and whistles: video and music playback, video capture, and portable, easy to read window on your e-mail and the rest of the on-line world.  That’s all well and good, but I don’t think removing the keyboard is much of a revolution.

The iPod was revolutionary.  There were mp3 players before it, but the iPod made it easy and cool to take songs by the thousand off of college kids’hard drives and out the door.  The iPhone strikes me as another of Apple’s neat little products that will inflame the hearts of a dedicated minority, but be dismissed as too expensive and too cutesy by wider audiences.  Am I the only one who remembers the Newton?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Apple’s phone will be the embarrassment that the Newton was.  The Newton was a good idea that came to market a few years before the technology was really there to make it work.  The iPhone is a lot more user friendly and is merely carving up an existing market a little bit finer, not trying to create a new one.  But there’s a funny parallel here I’d like to point out.

The breathless anticipation from the Apple/Mac zealots is almost identical, but they breathlessly anticipate anything with that little rainbow apple logo on it, so that’s not really important.  The disturbing similarity is in the marketing.  The Newton was billed as a revolutionary way to organize your life, but it was just a crappy handheld computer that cost too much and couldn’t recognize average handwriting.  The iPhone is being billed much the same way, as an almost life changing status symbol.  But it’s just a phone with a new interface.

If, a couple of years from now, most phones don’t have a keyboard in favor of a larger screen, then Apple will have been on to something.  But that seems unlikely.  The iPhone strikes me as sort of a Bose stereo for the cell phone set.  If you’ve got the cash (or at least the credit) and you value the brand, by all means buy one.  But people who view their cell phone as a tool, not a status symbol, won’t really care.

When I was playing with it, about the only thing I didn’t do was use it to make a call.  But perhaps that’s the point.  The iPhone is not the Holy Grail gadget that a lot of companies have been chasing for years now.  Someday, the prophecy goes, there will be one small, convenient device that you carry with you everywhere.  It will not only play music and video, it will play any music and video, from your home computer or off the web no matter where you are.  It will let you go on-line and do anything you can with a regular computer.  It will let you check in on your kids while you’re out to dinner.  It will, in short, allow you quick and easy access to the world of information from anywhere.

One day Apple or some other company will get that figured out.  But the iPhone is, at best, a primitive step on that path.  In the meantime, the one area it truly excels at is defining yourself to other people.  Let them ‘Ohh’and ‘Ahh’and tell you how jealous they are.  Be aware though that six months or a year from now, they’ll be able to buy iPhones that have all the bugs worked out for half the price (or less).