Unhyping the iPhone

I have to admit, the iPhone from Apple is an amazing system. But when listening to the Hype Master it is sure to just make you drool. Obviously this is his goal but you will have to try to look through the fog to find out what this phone really does for you. By now, I found some problems with it that are important to keep in mind.

1\. No UMTS : Ok people, this is no revolution. I now have a smaller Nokia E70 in my pocket, with UMTS, WiFi, fold-out Keyboard, full eMail client, the works. Doesn’t possibly look so cool but full featured and fully syncing (also over the air and not only with the Mac) and with a memory card slot that currently holds 2GB. I have a mobile podcast client on there that gets me the newest TWiT whenever it is available. The power in this is UMTS! I have a UMTS flatrate and hence am always online. When I am no the train, or in a pub, or at a conference, UMTS is very good to have and it is way faster than EDGE. EDGE never was really 3G, it’s just at the edge of being 3G. UMTS is 3G.

2\. No VoIP : The Nokia has a VoIP client and there at least seems to be a Skype client in development. I didn’t hear anything about VoIP in this system. Especially as they are working together with Cingular so closely, with Cingular possibly paying a large part of the fee, I doubt that we will see VoIP anytime soon.

3\. OS X : Sure, nice, but as Scot said, where is the SDK? I surely can’t just move my app over. So make sure to understand this correctly. It is _based_ on OS X. Update : No 3rd Party apps will be possible.

4\. Visual Keypad : Amazing, this is exactly what the PC did. This is why we all have touchscreen keyboards and PCs. Because tactile feedback sucks big time. NOT! They needed this because they didn’t have place for a keyboard. Smartphones have configurable buttons.

5\. Visual Voice Mail : This only works with Cingular. The voice mails are on the network, and are navigated via pressing the right keys. They needed to work together with Cingular to make this work and it will not work with any other carrier. So really, this is great, but it is to be seen whether they will make it work at any carrier or if it will always be locked in on the carrier. I for one will not switch from Base at the moment.

6\. Safari : Safari is not the best web browser in the world and I do have a pretty decent browser on my Nokia, ok, also based on the Safari engine. And I do have a special Google Maps app and I do have a special GMail client.

7\. IMAP eMail : I have IMAP. IMAP is not push like Blackberry!!! Blackberry means you are not always online and for IMAP push you will have to be always online. I will have to take a closer look at what else Yahoo! does but I do doubt it is Blackberry level.

8\. 2 Mega Pixel Camera : A well, good, but I do have 3 Mega Pixels and a new Nokia has 5 Mega Pixels. I also didn’t see video recording or Shozu to automatically Moblog

9\. Kill app phone calls : Did you watch closely? Did you see where the microphone is? At the bottom. Good. Did you see where the speaker is? At the bottom. WHAT? Do I listen with my chin? So this is a phone you will have to use with headphones.

All in all, still a great device but I am not sure it’s a phone, which might not be bad.

Update : See comments for the fact that there is another speaker at the top of the phone it seems.