Most of you will immediately assume I'm against the iPhone because it's made by Apple. But that's not the case. Admittedly, the iPhone is a pretty cool gadget. It's what most of us have wanted for a while -- not to have to carry around a phone, MP3 player and a camera, and find pockets for all these gadgets.
But there's one main reason the iPhone is not for me: there's no way in hell it's going to be durable enough. I put my phone through hell. Toss it, drop it, sit on it, even throw it sometimes. My current phone is on it's fourth changeable cover (and it already has a crack!).
I can't possibly imagine the iPhone withstanding that sort of abuse. Hell, the iPod -- which doesn't even have a touch screen -- doesn't even appear to be able to withstand that sort of abuse.
And the second reason I won't be buying an iPhone is because of the web browser. Apple seems to think that it'd be a great idea to throw a desktop web browser onto a phone. Wrong. A small display (e.g. 320x240) is a very different medium to a desktop (typically 1024x768). You can't slap a desktop web browser onto a small display and expect it to be anywhere close to usable.
Looks like I'll still have to wait for Windows "smart phones" to come down significantly in price.
Comments
I think it's going to be a great device. Finally a full-featured web browser in a phone. Having seen the videos of the phone it appears to be similiar to how the Wii browser works. Basically you get a zoomed out view of the page and then you can zoom onto particular parts of the page. Also keep in mind that it's 320x480 at 160ppi so that's an incredibly detailed view even at the most zoomed out. And rotate the phone and the view switches to landscape so you should be able to get all the page in that.
I would like to mention that if Apple had released the iPhone with a mobile browser then Peter would have complained that they should have made a full featured one with all that power and screen real estate.
From all indications (and like a lot of Apple products) you really need to be able to use it to appreciate it. And my prediction is that this will go off and sell like hotcakes (or iPods).