CES and Macworld
When a gadget fiend wakes up and his RSS reader, which was empty when he went to sleep, has over 100 posts it means two things. The first is that he slept until sundown. The second is that CES is in session.
I haven’t seen anything killer yet (though I am still a day behind). Lots of the old standards but bigger (or smaller, whichever is better) and better. Bigger televisions, smaller mp3 players. Pretty much what you’d expect.
It looks like iRiver is making a return to form. For a few years there they were pumping out the best mp3 players, but for the last 2 or so they’ve been releasing one turd after another. It sounds like it finally has another winner with the W10. I’ve been wondering for about 2 years why nobody was making mp3 players with touch screens. About damn time iRiver. Now can I just get it with 80gb please?
Sling Media demoed their Palm OS SlingPlayer, making me wish even more that I hadn’t invested so much in Windows Media Center. I’m inches from getting myself a damn Slingbox and a second cable tuner with built in HD DVR.
Let’s see, what else. WowWee made some more kickass robots, but none that look as cool as the dragonfly. Google around for the video on that one. I’m too lazy to do it for you, but it looks pretty tight.
OQO busted out the model 02, and damn does that thing look sweet. Had I not just bought a 3 lb laptop I’d probably pick one of those up immediately. I may anyway.
Over at Macworld Apple announced the iPhone and clueless idiots immediately drove their stock price up. First of all, pretty much everyone knew that was coming, so the time to buy Apple stock would have been beforehand. And second, it’s kind of a dud. I think Apple is in over their head here. In fact if anyone wants to wager that Apple will sell 10 million of these in the US in 2008, as is their goal, I’ll be happy to take the under.
My first though was actually “wow, apple finally made something I’d buy.” But then I looked a bit closer and discovered that not only would I not buy it, almost nobody else will.
For one thing it’s tied to Cingular. Rumors had it that Apple was bucking the system, not taking money from an individual carrier (as most phone makers do) for R&D costs in return for an exclusive contract, meaning that their product would cost more but be available to everyone. I thought that was a brilliant move.
Apparently the opposite is true. They tied themselves to a carrier and still the phone is obscenely expensive. It’s $499 for the 4gb model ($599 for the 
with a two year Cingular contract. I assume that means they’ll cost $700 and $800 respectively without a service agreement. Yikes.
The phone is thin and sports a giant touchscreen (again, something I’ve been waiting for for 2 years). Apple’s claimed battery life is decent, but they have a long-running track record of greatly overestimating (see iPod). And it has a bunch of nifty gimmick features, like a sensor that turns the screen off when you put it to your ear and an accelerometer to automatically switch from landscape to portrait when you turn the phone sideways. And it has wi-fi, which should combo well with the browser and that big, beautiful screen.
But upon closer examination there are a hell of a lot of things wrong with it, other than the price and carrier. It doesn’t support third party apps (it’s not really a smartphone). It has a QWERY function on the touchpad, but typing on it couldn’t possibly be better than a dedicated keypad and could be a lot worse. It remains to be seen how much worse it will actually be, but it will be worse. They claim their touchpad is revolutionary, and if so maybe it will be almost as good as typing on a Treo, but again I’m skeptical.
And most importantly, it doesn’t support 3g. That’s a big deal now for a $700 cell phone (hell, it’s a big deal now for a $300 cell phone) and in 2008 it will be a deal breaker. Anyone who doesn’t live in a large city spends a lot of time outside of wi-fi range and 3g is really a killer app for a phone with a browser. I guess if I lived in San Fran or some other city with muni-fi the iPhone might look pretty attractive (assuming there aren’t far cheaper and better phones out by the time it hits market), but I don’t, so it doesn’t.
My favorite quote about the iPod so far is from Time Magazine:
Apple’s new iPhone could do to the cell phone market what the iPod did to the portable music player market: crush it pitilessly beneath the weight of its own superiority.
More like Apple’s new iPhone won’t do to the cell phone market what the iPod did to the portable music player market: crush it pitilessly beneath the weight of its own mediocrity and marketing.
The iPod is a mediocre product with great marketing, and that works because it costs $200. The iPhone is a mediocre product with the same marketing that costs 3.5 times as much. I could just get an 8gb iPod Nano (if I decided I wanted an overpriced, kinda crappy mp3 player) and a Razr with a 2 year contract for $250, and by the time the iPhone debuts that will likely be $200. What’s my motivation, even if I were a Cingular subscriber, to get an iPhone for $550 more?
So yeah, I’m not impressed. I was impressed for about 10 minutes. But I’m not anymore.
I even wanted to be, as much as I hate Apple, because Steve Jobs is right about one thing, I hate my cell phone. We all do because they all hold so much promise and continuously fail to deliver. But so does this one.
It wasn’t until the 4th generation of iPods that they went from bad to mediocre, maybe in 2012 the iPhone will go from mediocre to good.
