And lo! The great day came.
I have been using an Apple iPhone now for more than four months. This is due to an unhealthy mixture of friendship with its designer, a slobbery and pathetic love of the new, the possession of an American billing address (necessary until today for the activation and use of the device) and a willingness to pay preposterous international roaming charges. It puts me in a good position however, to tell you what you’re in for if you decide to own one of these honeys.
I should first get out of the way all the matters that will please those of you wrinkling your noses in a contemptuous Ian Hisloppy sort of way at the sheer hype, pretension, nonsense and hoopla attendant on what is, after all, only a phone. There is much to support your case.
Proud techie owners of rival devices can say: “What, only a 2-meg camera? What, no GPS? What, no 3G? What, no video? What, no third party applications?” What, no Sim card swapping?” A whole heap of what no-ing can be done.
Proud non-techie people can say: “I just want a phone that lets me make a call with the minimum of fuss. I don’t want a ‘design classic’ and I certainly don’t want to be locked into an 18-month data plan, whatever that might be.”
Even those excited by the iPhone and likely to block their ears to the derisive hoots above, even they must allow themselves honestly to accept its drawbacks. Text entry is, despite the spine-tingling brilliance of a creepily accurate auto-correct facility, clumsy. There are perhaps a dozen niggles of that nature (though the camera isn’t one: the iPhone’s lowly 2-megapixel snapper easily outperforms higher-spec rivals). So what’s to set against these drawbacks?
Beauty. Charm. Delight. Excitement. Ooh. Aah. Wow! Let me at it.
In the end the iPhone is like some glorious early-60s sports car. Not as practical, reliable, economical, sensible or roomy as a family saloon but oh, the joy. The jouissance as Roland Barthes liked to say. What it does, it does supremely well, that what it does not do seems laughably irrelevant.
The iPhone is a digital experience in the literal sense of the word. The user’s digits roam, stroke, tweak, tweeze, pinch, probe, slide, swipe and tap across the glass screen forging a relationship with the device that is like no other.
“But I don’t want to ‘forge a relationship’, I just want to get the job done,” you say? Well then, you know what? Don’t buy one. And stop reading this. You’re only doing so in the first place to lend fuel to your snorts and puffs of rage. Allow us our pleasures.
Whatever your view on Apple’s new instant icon, you will not be able to deny that it has already changed forever what was already a colossal market.
There was pre-iPhone and there will be post-iPhone. All the competitors will have to come up with something better. I’m no red in tooth and claw capitalist, but actually, I can’t think this example of mercantile evolution-through-competition is so very bad.
Conflict-traded rare earths and minerals, that’s another matter. Someone wrote to tell me that the iPhone is full of Congolese metals. Guardian readers may want elucidation on this front. I’m not the man to give it, I fear.
The rest of the world can mock as much as it likes. If you’re going to have a phone/video player/slideshow/music centre/web browser/camera in your pocket, is it so wrong to want one that makes you grin from ear to ear? Not with smugness (though heaven knows the enemies of the device will read that into the smiles) but with delight.
© Stephen Fry 2007
Stephen Fry’s gadget column, Dork Talk, appears in The Guardian newspaper’s Weekend section.
Olga…
Hello, I have a few websites of my own and I must say that your site is really top notch. Keep up the great work on a really high class resource….
Spent the weekend playing with “Android”, Google’s venture into the mobile world. The UI is surprisingly more like OS X than the iPhone, with Dock like menu on the home screen (sorry, “activity”), and Aqua-esque buttons.
It highlighted, for me, the difference in philosophy between the two companies. Apple’s phone may have a lot of UI cleverness, but in terms of third party software development the system is stillborn. At the moment only web apps are supported. No JavaME, no Brew, just Ajax — with the dawn of the RIA Apple has decided to pin its hopes on a technology already cited by many developers as due for extinction. And I’m not holding out any hopes for the release of the SDK early next year. Steve Jobs has commented that the iPhone OS is basically a cut down edition of OS X. Great, except OS X app development pretty much has its own eco-system, with its own tools, its own languages (Objective C anyone?) and its own deployment architectures. It’s like pounds shillings and pence in a decimal world.
And unlike JME, iPhone development requires your software be approved by Apple before it can go anywhere near an end-user iPhone. So that pretty much kills dead any hobbyist/amateur/Open Source market.
First glace suggest that Google’s Android is very easy to write software for. With Java blessed as the language of choice, Android is open to the majority of coders. The architecture is component based, and very robust. It is actually a doddle to link applications (‘activities’) together, making it very easy to call on the power of, say, Google Maps within my app, or send arbitary messages between phones on the network via XMPP. And if the end-user doesn’t like Google Maps they can swap it out for some other mapping component instead. All the components are linked at runtime, and so can be swapped for alternatives by the user.
From the viewpoint of the developer I see the iPhone as a closed system, very rigid, and very proprietary. Apple seems to live in its own little bubble, with its own tools, rules and conventions. It wouldn’t surprise me if they started documenting their APIs only in Esperanto. Google have basically provided a lovely box of shiny new toys, with a very simple and flexible (but familiar) framework for plugging them together, and invited the world to have fun and explore. Google looks forward to the coming of RIAs, Apple look backwards to Web 2.0.
Mind you, final judgement must be reserved for when Apple finally part-open the iPhone and start shipping their SDK. But I’m not confident.
I put this iPhone video on youtube a year ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_f-KK140vM
Every other comment since it went up has been ‘there’s no 3G’ ‘camera is crap’ ‘it’s too big’ ‘can’t unlock it’ ‘no video camera’ etc etc. Who cares that it’s not up to spec when it looks the way it does?
Oh, and there’s a cool robot video on my youtube profile as well.
Being incredibly shallow as to buying any new gadget I can afford, decided I wanted, for no specific reason other than to own one , an apple itouch. My mobile phone had a good camera and being tied up on a monthly contract had no need of an iphone.
I love the look, the feel and the, although somewhat limited, features of it, I think I made the right choice as opposed to the iphone. It has internet capabilities, I can watch films, and use it as a traditional ipod.
One thing, however, annoys me is the fact that itunes (America) advertises films to download at a reasonable price, yet UK itunes does not offer that capability, and I am not “allowed” to download from the US site.
It would seem similar to the feature film issue that is inexplicable to me, why we still have to wait about a year before we get to see films over here. Strange.
OK, so not quite two months since my last post, and I took the plunge. I love the damn thing. I’d marry if I could. Love.it. I think your post was the deciding factor. Thank you, Stephen!
gps mapping equipment…
If you are in the market for a navigation system, you cannot go wrong with the portable gps ratings and reviews system….
[...] so true. Ask anybody who has one. Or get one. Or just read this article by Stephen Fry: http://stephenfry.com/blog/?p=24 yours truly, justin bradshaw PS: in addition to being an email BCCd to 62 people I know who [...]
Despite your niggaling issues I still want one rather badly. *sigh* gonna have to wait till i get a new job though.
This may not solve your text entry issues but with your love of gadgets I thought you might want to hear about it (if you don’t have one already). Its a laser keyboard, bluetooth device so you can hook up to your smartphones, and I assume other bluetooth ready devices. the one I found is not REALLY mac friendly but there might be one out there that is, if not it’s a cool looking bit of kit anyway!
http://www.thinkgeek.com/interests/dads/8193/