At the end of November I read an article on the latest DMCA exemptions, one of which allows people to legally unlock their phone in order to use it with another carrier… instead of having to toss it out, buy a new phone for no good reason, etc.
Given Apple’s announcement today of the iPhone, this is a perfect time to ask why Apple and Cingular are only offering it ‘exclusively’ together, and why the price point only reflects a 2-year contract. This kills competition.
I can see that there are some features of the phone (like how it appears to pre-download voicemail directly to the phone via data services) which would allow these companies to argue that this is a new, special kind of service.
But I can’t imagine that (given the opportunity to,) another carrier like T-mobile would really have a hard time adapting their backend to support a phone like Apple’s, including the new technologies that they’re offering. It’d be pretty funny to pop my T-Mobile SIM card into an Apple iPhone, just to see what’d happen.
As an end user who specifically switched from Sprint to T-Mobile *just* to get a carrier who would support phones with bluetooth (to enable easy syncing with my mac), you’d think I would jump right on the bandwagon. Obviously Apple has tried a lot harder this time than just slightly modifying someone else’s phone and popping 100 songs onto it.
But when I read about Cingular’s ridiculous customer service, high rates, etc… I’m not very excited about the idea of having to go through the switch process again, port my number, AND get locked into a new two-year contract with a crappy carrier; I last bought a phone on eBay which someone had originally had set up for AT&T, and was able to use it unlocked out of the box on T-Mobile, with no ‘special deal’ locking me into a longer contract or forcing me to give the phone back.
I have a Nokia (6620) phone that’s capable of doing internet enabled stuff, but I don’t use it because I don’t think the phone is fast enough, nor do I think the OS (symbian) is really cut out for it. And the data rates are prohibitive. So I just use it as a phone. Sure, I can sync my calendar, and my address book, but I rarely use it to enter that data. If I take pictures with the built-in camera, I can use bluetooth to beam them off of the phone. If I want to put apps or pictures or whatever onto it, I can send them to the phone with bluetooth. Therefore, the cell network is only used to place and receive calls.
I’m excited about the ability to place outbound VOIP calls over Wifi, but am willing to guess that *IF* Cingular even allows you to receive incoming calls via the Wifi connection, you’ll still end up being charged minutes for the privilege of getting incoming calls to your cell number. Plus, then there’d have to be some way for the phone to register with Cingular via some internet gateway, and authenticate, before they’d route calls to you.
I’m curious to see whether Apple allows third party apps (and not just lame ‘widgets’) on the phone, including skype.
I wonder whether Apple has any special hardware built into the phone for VOIP or whether that’s all accomplished in software. If there is any special hardware, I’m curious to know whether there will be access to frameworks it for developer SDKs, etc.
Speaking of which, it ‘runs OS X’. Okay, someone mentioned today that in order to drive a desktop mac, that’d take something like 550 MB to do a minimum system install. You can’t take away from user storage space (advertised as 4 GB or 8 GB) for your firmware or ‘OS’, right? I think a lot of questions will be answered if and when they release a dev kit for the iPhone.
Is this like Microsoft and the ‘.NET’ initiative? Some portable subset of the OS is compiled to run on these devices? (I haven’t yet even seen what chipset it runs.)
Will they even support third party apps at all? After all, there is a huge aftermarket for downloading stupid ringtones and programs onto smartphones. I certainly hope that this isn’t a situation like that. All this ‘value added’ crap. I just want to buy a device, once, and pay a reasonable fee for connectivity. Just what I connect to shouldn’t have to be run through some carrier-provided internet ‘gateway’ which is more like a filter. I sure hope this isn’t the case, given the Wifi built into the device. So there’s some hope, anyway.
If so, I want yojimbo, omnioutliner, and some kind of … hmm. Would an app like QuickSilver be useful on a device like this?
And, of course, terminal. Gotta be able to, uh, SSH into my iPhone. And a NO-IP client, so I can.. uh.. remote manage my iPhone. Or something.
Does it have a straight-up hard drive mode? But again, that would imply a lot. Folders? If so, how to navigate them? A Finder-like interface on the device? Right now if I store something on an iPod, I can’t do anything with it until/unless I plug into another computer.
GPS – I don’t think the device has GPS, but they talked about it being ‘location-aware’. So I think that the technology they’re referring to is probably based on triangulation based on cell phone towers. I also wonder *where* this calculation happens; does the device do it by itself? (eg is each of the towers sending out its Lat/Lon coordinates?) Somehow I doubt it. More likely, the phone has to ask the network, “Hey! Where am I now?!?” and multiple towers have to provide signal strength / vector information to be calculated as a service, somewhere else. This, of course, means that they always know where you are, whoever they are.
Sensors – The iPhone has a sensor to determine whether you’re in ‘portrait’ or ‘landscape’ mode. Okay, what about when it’s on a flat surface like a table? There is also a sensor which ‘knows’ that you’ve got the phone up to your ear, which dims the display and prevents accidental ‘ear touches’ from doing things you don’t want.
more later…