iPhone - what’s missing?
10th January 2007
So Apple have announced the iPhone at last: iPod, phone and internet in one small device. With Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a quad-band phone, a touch-sensitive wide-screen, speaker, microphone and even OS X, surely there’s nothing missing?
Actually, two things are conspicuous by their absence.
First, the scroll wheel. This distinguishes the iPod from all other MP3 players. It’s what makes it so easy to use. You can effortlessly find your way through hundreds of songs without having to lift your finger off the iPod’s surface. The iPhone demos seem to indicate that you’ll now have to scroll through lists by stroking your finger up or down the screen. So scrolling through a long list will mean repeated strokes instead of a single circular motion. The iPhone’s user interface looks quite different from the iPod’s, so maybe the process of selecting songs is different enough not to need a scroll wheel. Or maybe you can still move your finger in a circle to scroll.
The second omission is 3G support. This might not be a problem in the USA, where the majority of phones are GSM (2G), but it could be in Europe. Here, the mobile operators are keen to move customers onto their 3G networks, though they really have no compelling services to make the move worthwhile. A ‘must-have’ 3G phone would have helped but instead we have another ‘must-have’ 2G phone (which will at last take over from the Motorola V3 RAZR).
If there’s as much demand for the iPhone as expected, could it slow down 3G adoption in Europe?