iPhone: Now with more battery life

A recent story about the iPhone entitled "
The iPhone will fly and keep flying", and the news of the iPhone having even greater battery life than previously announced has sort of set this Monday morning off with quite a commotion.

The Apple iPhone is an interesting device to discuss, if only because Apple has (even before the release of the iPhone) changed the landscape of cellphones forever. Let's start off with the basics -- it's a $500 ($600 if you want the 8GB version) phone that does it all -- WiFi, camera, plays audio and video with a very nice display, and to top it off, has a slick touchscreen interface. It's the cellphone that all the other cellphone companies are saying that noone wants, and it's the phone that consumers seem to be going gaga for. Almost all experts and analysts are predicting a huge success for Apple, and I'm inclined to agree. Consider this -- at MacWorld SF 2007, where over 45,000 Mac fans saw the iPhone (and took pictures, video and pressed their noses up against the glass) while it rotated in the locked glass case, these past 6 months have only fed the desire, and statistically speaking, a quarter of people with cellphones have had their 2 year contracts expire during these past 6 months. Demand, despite it's $500 price tag will be huge. Consider this: If we take out the functionality that a new 4GB iPod nano offers, it makes the iPhone a $300 cellphone/digital camera/internet with a touchscreen.

Portability and price has always been a big deal in cellphones -- in general, the more portable the cellphone is, the more expensive it is, and the more features it packs to justify that price. Palm can get away with selling the Treo because it's a Palm Pilot organizer and a cellphone -- but it's a pretty bulky phone. Motorola's Razr on the other hand is much less functional than a Treo, but has that nice compact form factor that everyone likes. The iPhone is just as feature packed as the Treo (but the Treo lacks Wi-Fi) and costs more, but it's even slimmer.

What makes the iPhone different from all the rest is that it promises a more usable interface than their competitors. I own a Nokia -- it's the same cellphone I've used for 3 years. It has a little thumb joystick to navigate the menus. To get from the ready state to making a phone call, I need to thumb down twice (to get to the Contacts menu), tap the joystick button (to select the Contacts menu), tap the joystick button again(to select find from the Contacts Menu), and then thumb down to the person or hit the number key a number of times appropriate to that person's first letter of their name. Those steps seem particularly troublesome to me, and I've never really understood why Contacts rests so far in, while Messages is the topmost item. It's a phone, and the most frequent thing you're going to be doing is going to be doing is calling people. Apple understands this, but more than that, they understand that people are going to be using their phone for doing other things as well, and to make those things easy to do.

Last November, thousands of people camped out in front of toy stores and electronics stores to be the first to snag a $600 game system with the intention of flipping it on eBay for an instant profit. As we saw, the eBay market for PS3s died a spectacular death, netting most of these cold, rained and snowed upon November campers a profit margin hardly worth the trouble. Cellphones are much harder to flip on eBay, so I don't think we'll be seeing a lot of sales through eBay for iPhones. The same situation was with the Wii on eBay. Most purchasers of the Wii kept theirs, which resulted in a much smaller number of consoles on eBay.

We don't know how many iPhones will hit the street on June 29th -- with numbers as low as 40,000 and numbers as high as 3 million, it's anyone's guess. Although I lust after one as much as any technology geek does, portable electronics doesn't thrill me as much anymore. Even so, I predict that it will sell well, and it will sell out that weekend. There are factors to slow down the sales of iPhones -- with unknowns like the length of contract one must subscribe to, and the contract costs for data, I'm waiting for those announcements before I make a decision. The greatest promise that the iPhone holds, of course is that of having "Internet in the pocket", but with the cost of that unknown, it's tough to see that working out in a cost-beneficial fashion.

We will see headlines like "Man robbed/injured/shot/killed because of iPhone" because just as the iPod's white headphones were an indicator that someone was carrying an iPod, a person holding up what looks like an iPod their ear is a sure indicator that they're carrying an $500 iPhone. iPod-related crimes went down significantly after the introduction of the shuffle, since the white headphones no longer indicated a $250-350 product to snatch -- perhaps making the white headphones commonplace will also help iPhone customers in keeping their new toys from being stolen.