Last Friday (i-Day) after class I found myself at a shopping center that happened to have an AT&T store. I saw that the line was not too long so I decided that even if I did not make the plunge to buy an iPhone I would probably at least get to play with one. An AT&T marketing rep was working the line with an iPhone that I did get to spend a few minutes examining. The interface is sweet, though text entry will take a little getting used to.
When I finally got into the store after about 15 minutes in line they were out of the 8 gigabyte models. The sexy screen of the iPhone was just made for watching video, so in my opinion 4 gig just are not enough. So, that was enough of a reality check to call me back into reality, so I walked away without getting the iPhone.
All in all I’m on the fence about whether or not to wait for version 2.0 of the iPhone. I still think not having the higher-speed HSDPA on the phone makes it less useful. Also in the last several months it seems that the number of places AT&T service is not available is pretty significant, including the business school and my office. I would overlook this if I could hop on to a wireless network to connect my voice traffic, a la T-Mobile’s voice call termination over Wi-Fi.
The iPhone presents wonderful opportunities for carriers and handset-makers alike, and I expect that the benefits will felt beyond AT&T and Apple to extend to their competitors. I’m very biased when it comes to Apple’s genius with user interface and integration of multiple (admittedly proprietary) hardware and software products into a functional and usable system. Smart phones have historically been very poor in this area: the data side of my Treo is so useless it’s little more than a big-ass phone. Hopefully a usable and beautiful phone that functions seamlessly with the Internet and users’ computers will be the kick in the pants phone manufacturers need to make useful smart phones of their own. AT&T are opening up the gates ever so slightly to a more open approach to applications and business models– they’ll see the benefits of this and other carriers will hopefully pick up the clue phone.
