Hands on with the Apple iPhone

Urban Weigl

You could call iPhone perfect

January 18, 2007
BY ANDY IHNATKO
I have used the Apple iPhone. I had a private briefing the day after Steve Jobs' keynote and spent about 45 minutes noodling around with the device.
You may touch the hem of my robe if you wish.

In response to a Beatlemania-scale pile of e-mails, here's what I can tell you so far, based on my hands-on impressions, my talks with Apple and general first-hand sniffing around:


1. The touch-interface works flawlessly, in terms of both technical function and user interface design. Whatever you want to do -- select an album to play, make or take a call, compose and send an e-mail -- your first impulse is almost always the correct one.

This is the simplest phone ever.

And there are no lags, no pauses, no waiting for the slickly animated UI to catch up with you, even when you're scrolling through a stack of album art that's flopping past your finger in 3D: It's liquid.

The bad news: It works only with direct, skin contact. You can't wear gloves, and I don't know if you can even put a screen protector on it. On the plus side, the screen is supposed to be more scratch-resistant than an iPod.

"So long as you don't have a pocket full of broken glass, it'll be OK in there," I was told.


2. I think the iPhone's virtual keyboard is a huge improvement over the mechanical thumbpads found on the Treo and any other smart phones of its size.

The buttons are significantly larger, you don't have to hit them dead-center, you lightly tap them instead of punching them down, and the software is smart enough to know that you meant to type "Tuesday" instead of "Tudsday."

After 30 seconds, I was already typing faster with the iPhone than I ever have with any other phone. I suspect that true e-mail demons will need to adapt to the lack of tactile feedback, though.


3. It's the most beautiful freakin' display I've ever seen on a phone or PDA, both in range of color and level of detail. Even microscopic browser text is credibly readable.


4. The apps that were functional at the time of the demo give the satisfying, protein-rich experience of "real" software. The mail client and browser make you feel like you're using a powerful desktop app, not a cell phone that can kind of send e-mail and browse the Web (depending on how you define "e-mail" and "the Web").


5. Apple will keep a very tight rein on software development.

I asked point-blank if third parties would be able to write and distribute iPhone apps and was told, point-blank, no.

However, it appears that there'll be some third-party opportunities. I'm going to take a guess that iPhone software will be distributed the same way as iPod games: no "unsigned" apps will install, but apps will start appearing on the iTunes Store after successfully passing through a mysterious process of Apple certification -- one that ensures that they meet a certain standard of quality and won't, you know, secretly send your credit-card info to Nigeria.

The lockdown on software is an area of ongoing suspicious interest. I noticed that the iPhone's pre-release browser was missing some plug-ins. I asked if Real and Macromedia et al. would be writing media plug-ins for the iPhone's Web browser, and was told that no, the browser would ship with plug-ins, but Apple would be writing them all in-house. Odd, that.


6. The iPhone runs the same OS as the Macintosh. And not in the way that Windows Mobile is, I suppose, technically, if you want to split hairs about it, classified somewhere in the Microsoft Windows phylum.

Nope, everything I've learned (both in official briefings and "you and I never spoke, all right?" sort of discussions) says that it truly does run Leopard, the upcoming 10.5 OS that will be released for the Macintosh late in the spring.

Those spiffy UI animations, for instance, come courtesy of Leopard's Core Animation suite.

So will it run Mac software? Nope. The iPhone runs OS X, but it's an iPhone, not a Macintosh. And it stands to reason that the OS on the iPhone doesn't include any bits that it doesn't need.

And no, the iPhone's Widgets aren't the same as the Mac's Dashboard widgets. But they do use DashCode and other desktop widget tech, so who knows? I'm really hoping that widgets will be more open to third-party developers than apps.


7. The iPhone is still under development and isn't feature-complete. I opened the "Notes" application and found myself tapping impotently at a JPEG of what the app is supposed to look like. And the camera app only had one button.

Any complaints about what the iPhone can't do are premature. Remember, it won't ship for six months.

I really, really like what I've seen so far. But true judgment won't come until June.


Andy Ihnatko writes on technical and computer issues for the Sun-Times.

SOURCE: http://www.suntimes.com/technology/ihnatko/215441,CST-FIN-Andy18.article

Urban Weigl

440Hz

YUM YUM!!! *waits patiently*

digitally-yours

Its Over hyped also keel the following in mind

Sure, LG's KE850 Prada handset will set users back a cool $778, and the Google Switch just might pop in to make things a bit more interesting, but a recent research report has unveiled that Apple's sure-to-be-sold-out iPhone is a lean, mean, profit-generating machine nonetheless. While Apple's well-known for selling its iPods (and to a lesser extent, its Macs) for much, much more than it cost to manufacture, even we're a bit taken aback at how hard those corporate buyers must be workin' those suppliers on this one. According to iSuppli (no affiliation with Apple, of course), the 4GB iPhone will yield a "49.3 percent profit margin on each unit sold at the $499 retail price," while the 8GB rendition will kick back a 46.9-percent margin. You heard right, they're supposing the $499 mobile only costs Apple $245.83 to produce, while the 8GB flavor demands just $264.85. Of course, this isn't the first time a hot-selling product has been broken down by the numbers to prove just how ripped off we're all getting (if these numbers are to be trusted, that is) -- but hey, unless you've got the means to buy capacitors and LCD touchscreens by the boatload, you're probably stuck paying exactly what they ask. Plus if all this sudden competition gets a bit too heated, don't think Apple doesn't have any room to introduce a (highly desired) price drop.

source
http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/18/50-percent-of-your-iphone-purchase-to-pad-apples-wallet/

Urban Weigl

You do realise that's excluding all research and development, distribution, marketing, etc, costs? Not to mention it's preliminary, since iSuppli are just guessing (they haven't gotten their hands on one to disassemble yet). Lastly, if you've even seen the pricing of Nokia handsets, it looks to me like they're making even higher margins.

All that said, I will be waiting for the second generation with full 3G and lower cost.

johnp

digitally-yours wrote:

Its Over hyped also keel the following in mind

Sure, LG's KE850 Prada handset will set users back a cool $778, and the Google Switch just might pop in to make things a bit more interesting, but a recent research report has unveiled that Apple's sure-to-be-sold-out iPhone is a lean, mean, profit-generating machine nonetheless. While Apple's well-known for selling its iPods (and to a lesser extent, its Macs) for much, much more than it cost to manufacture, even we're a bit taken aback at how hard those corporate buyers must be workin' those suppliers on this one. According to iSuppli (no affiliation with Apple, of course), the 4GB iPhone will yield a "49.3 percent profit margin on each unit sold at the $499 retail price," while the 8GB rendition will kick back a 46.9-percent margin. You heard right, they're supposing the $499 mobile only costs Apple $245.83 to produce, while the 8GB flavor demands just $264.85. Of course, this isn't the first time a hot-selling product has been broken down by the numbers to prove just how ripped off we're all getting (if these numbers are to be trusted, that is) -- but hey, unless you've got the means to buy capacitors and LCD touchscreens by the boatload, you're probably stuck paying exactly what they ask. Plus if all this sudden competition gets a bit too heated, don't think Apple doesn't have any room to introduce a (highly desired) price drop.

source
http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/18/50-percent-of-your-iphone-purchase-to-pad-apples-wallet/

Do those figures include the cost of developing the product?

Urban Weigl

johnp wrote:

Do those figures include the cost of developing the product?

Those figures are just for the materials and manufacturing. As with pretty much all iSuppli figures, they don't include the cost of developing the product.

Kinda unrelated, but does anyone know of good phones with 480x320 screen resolution? The Sony Ericsson W950i, which I'm thinking about getting, costs the same as the iPhone from what I can tell, only has 4GB and not 8GB, only has half the screen resolution (240x320) and even though it has no camera, it's thicker and bulkier.

johnp

Urban Weigl wrote:

Those figures are just for the materials and manufacturing. As with pretty much all iSuppli figures, they don't include the cost of developing the product.

Kinda unrelated, but does anyone know of good phones with 480x320 screen resolution? The Sony Ericsson W950i, which I'm thinking about getting, costs the same as the iPhone from what I can tell, only has 4GB and not 8GB, only has half the screen resolution (240x320) and even though it has no camera, it's thicker and bulkier.

In that case, it's a fairly poor rant by the author.

Sorry, can't help on your other question.