To be sure, we pretty much expected this year's iPhone announcement to be a yawner compared to prior years.
Much of the yawn is of course attributable to the highly publicized Apple employee party foul leak of an actual iPhone 4 prototype. That, combined with Apple's pre-announcement of some of the new OS features like multitasking, was always going to make it difficult for Jobs to deliver the same "wow!" factor as he has in the past. But to boot Steve's normally flawless presentation suffered from WiFi trouble. Liz Gannes of GigaOm, speaking on behalf of the many iPhone owners frustrated by AT&T's network issues called Job's WiFi trouble "poetic justice".
Yet iPhone 4 managed to make a splash with its appealing features. The new hardware (screen resolution, build quality) sounds rock solid. And I personally really like the emphasis on making the iPhone a better portable camera/video recorder. Extra battery life is always nice. The iPhone and Apple have a lot of momentum, and I expect iPhone 4 to sell well. And it will sell even better if it finally becomes available on Verizon.
But like other reviewers I was expecting at least a few more positive surprises from Apple with iOS than what we heard yesterday. Much of what Apple has done with the new OS is Android catchup (e.g., multitasking). And this might be the least exciting "one more thing" in Jobs keynote history: Face Time, the video calling feature. While video conferencing is new to the iPhone, it's a relatively old and familiar technology. And for now FaceTime only works on WiFi. Many times when I'm around WiFi I have my laptop and would prefer to use that for video conferencing because of the larger screen size.
One of the takeaways from iPhone 4 is that Apple may be struggling to make the same "insanely great" attention grabbing iPhone technological leaps as it has in the past. This doesn't bode well for Apple's product or stock price momentum, which is already in heady territory.
I would also add that some part of the iPhone's appeal as a status symbol has definitely been lost. This is in part due to the ubiquity of the iPhone, but also due to Apple's own iPad becoming the new must have gadget to show off.
Much of the yawn is of course attributable to the highly publicized Apple employee party foul leak of an actual iPhone 4 prototype. That, combined with Apple's pre-announcement of some of the new OS features like multitasking, was always going to make it difficult for Jobs to deliver the same "wow!" factor as he has in the past. But to boot Steve's normally flawless presentation suffered from WiFi trouble. Liz Gannes of GigaOm, speaking on behalf of the many iPhone owners frustrated by AT&T's network issues called Job's WiFi trouble "poetic justice".
Yet iPhone 4 managed to make a splash with its appealing features. The new hardware (screen resolution, build quality) sounds rock solid. And I personally really like the emphasis on making the iPhone a better portable camera/video recorder. Extra battery life is always nice. The iPhone and Apple have a lot of momentum, and I expect iPhone 4 to sell well. And it will sell even better if it finally becomes available on Verizon.
But like other reviewers I was expecting at least a few more positive surprises from Apple with iOS than what we heard yesterday. Much of what Apple has done with the new OS is Android catchup (e.g., multitasking). And this might be the least exciting "one more thing" in Jobs keynote history: Face Time, the video calling feature. While video conferencing is new to the iPhone, it's a relatively old and familiar technology. And for now FaceTime only works on WiFi. Many times when I'm around WiFi I have my laptop and would prefer to use that for video conferencing because of the larger screen size.
One of the takeaways from iPhone 4 is that Apple may be struggling to make the same "insanely great" attention grabbing iPhone technological leaps as it has in the past. This doesn't bode well for Apple's product or stock price momentum, which is already in heady territory.
I would also add that some part of the iPhone's appeal as a status symbol has definitely been lost. This is in part due to the ubiquity of the iPhone, but also due to Apple's own iPad becoming the new must have gadget to show off.
Overall, iPhone 4 is a nice evolutionary update. But I don't plan on upgrading anytime soon from my iPhone 3GS. A big reason is I'd like to wait a little while to see what Android has in the pipeline. Android has rapidly closed the gap with Apple to the point where their respective OSs and hardware are close to parity, in my opinion. And the speed at which Android's software and hardware is advancing is impressive compared to Apple.
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