The iPros and iCons of the Apple iPhone

The iPhone will be releasing on June 29th (2 weeks and 2 days) and I have a couple of things to say about it. I personally think that the iPhone will do well in its market, but there will be a few things that will be holding it back. A couple of those things are:

• No mechanical keyboard? The iPhone will only have one actual button and that is the “Home” button. There is only one upside to this and that is that the iPhone has gotten a 3.5″ screen. This will be good for people that would like to watch movies. The downside is that no one has even tried a phone without a mechanical keyboard. It may take some time to adjust too it or not even work well at all. Anyone outside of Apple have hardly even tried it.
• There is no HSDPA (3G) in the first version of the iPhone. “3G is third-generation technology in the context of mobile phone standards. The services associated with 3G include wide-area wireless voice telephony and broadband wireless data, all in a mobile environment. In marketing 3G services, video telephone has often been suggested as the killer application for 3G” (Wikipedia). Instead it will be a quad-band GSM phone. Although this may seem bad Steve Jobs has said another (later version) of the iPhone will support 3G. This should be once there’s enough HSDPA coverage in this country to justify it.
• Screen protection? Is the screen going to scratch proof? Is the screen going to be smudged up when you place your face and fingers on it? How is the screen going to be protected without the use of screen protectors?
• There will be no GPS on the iPhone. GPS should be a standard for all phones now as GPS is a needed function for places that you need to go. its not a major issue but its still something that should be standard on the phone.
• It will not run Mac OSX applications, games, or iChat. The iPhone will not be able to run Mac OSX applications, which is a big bust as its supportably coded off of the OSX core, you will not be able to play any games on the phone, meaning you won’t be able to download any games from the at&t store (formally Cingular) or anywhere and play them on your new phone. The iChat option is a big for instant messaging people, which they will be able to send messages to people on AIM, WLM, Yahoo! Messenger, etc., but that option is not there, so you would only be able to send SMS text messages.
• The web browser (Safari Mobile) will not support Java. This is because Steve jobs has said “Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain.” So this means there will be no Java.
• The battery is not removable. You would have to send in your iPhone to get the battery replaced if there is anything wrong with it. You can not just take it out and go to a wireless store and buy a new batter and pop it in like any other phone. If you have a iPod this is the same thing.
• You will not be able to open Word or Excel documents on the iPhone. You also would not be able to sync it with Outlook. This is strange as most people use Word and Excel and if they wanted to open a document or spreadsheet they would not be able to open it. Mr. Jobs has said there will be PDF support though.
• It will be a exclusive to at&t. That means Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, etc. would not be getting the iPhone until the exclusivity is over with at&t.
• The price of the iPhone. For the 4GB version its $499 and for an 8GB version of the phone its $599. Thats a lot for a phone.

These may be a lot of bad things, but there are good things about the phone also. A couple of those are:

• iPod functions and more will be built in. You can watch movies and listen to music on your iPhone.
• The iPhone will have a browser that won’t scale down the page like on most phones.
• The iPhone will be a touch sensitive new design that will please and change the market.
• The iPhone will have a phone built it.

There are many other pros and cons of the phone, but to fully see them all we would have to wait until the iPhone is released and see how the market handles it and how the users like it.