Wednesday, January 27, 2010

yay /sarcasm

Oh. Boy. A 10-inch iPhone.

UPDATE: Pardon me, a 10-inch iPod touch. The thing doesn't have a camera nor can it make phone calls. I can understand the phone thing, but removing the camera doesn't make any sense.

9 comments:

nightfly said...

Yeah... it seems a little ungainly for hauling around; one might as well have a full-blown laptop with a dedicated keyboard. For portability there are smartphones with touch screens and mini qwerty keyboards. The only thing it has on those is memory - and even there, I'm seeing 16 gb mmicro-SD cards for some devices.

It may work anyway. The key word in Jobs' presentation was "magical," and that's what Apple's marketing would have you buy, the magic of the Apple name, the cache, the "this is SO BOSS" vibe they seem to have cornered, if not patented. YMMV. Personally, I'm saving for a droid. I can get matching droids for me and the Ladybug for less than one of these doodads.

Cullen said...

Holy crap, I lost my huge reply. I'll do my best to recreate ...

On the iSuck, I thought it'd be a more fully-featured device like the Win 7-based tablets are. Oh well.

On the Droid - J-mom got one shortly after it was released. It is a very cool device. (The SCREEN!) However, it is a first-gen device using first-gen OS (the 2.0 isn't an upgrade of Android 1.X, it's a reworked version), so there are bugs. For example, she cannot get her Yahoo mail account synched to her phone. It just won't work. We've done everything every website has suggested - no joy. Other people have no issues, some do. Another thing, her phone will, at times, randomly dial someone in her address book. Seems to happen most often when she plugs it into the car charger. The fix for that seems to be to lock the phone.

That said, it's an exquisite piece of technology. I love my Blackberry Storm, but I do suffer from Ap envy. The Storm stupidly limits the memory on which you can install aps. It sucks. But I prefer the Blackberry's OS. Personal preference.

Just make sure you spend plenty of time with the phone at the store. Also make sure you take a look at the Droid Eris. It's a bit older phone and uses an Andoid 1.X OS (though it's supposed to get a v. 2.0 push sometime this quarter), but it's a VERY good phone and fact that Android 2.0 is coming to it makes it a steal.

nightfly said...

The Eris may be the way to go... there are features it supports that are more to my liking than the Droid's, but I like the Droid's actual-factual keyboard, and was holding out hope that software upgrades would improve some of the stuff offered.

Good advice on spending time with it in-store, too. Every time we're in there we fiddle with it, in small doses so nobody comes up to pester us with sales pitches. (Which is their job and I'm glad they're attentive, but still.)

A friend has an LG nV, the phone that wants to buy a vowel. I'll have to ask him about that. What you've said about the BB Storm jibes well with other friends who own them.

re: iSuck - sometimes I feel like that's my nickname around the rink. I should have trademarked it.

(w/v -"eumess" - another of my nicknames around the rink)

ricki said...

And they named it the iPad?

Seriously? SERIOUSLY, Apple? Did you not have any women in your focus groups? Do you know where a woman's mind goes immediately when "pad" is said?

Not a good place. Not a place where you want her mind going when she thinks of your new product.

Trust me, it's not "lily" and it's not "bachelor" we're thinking of when we hear "pad."

Maggie May said...

I thought the same thing, Ricki! iPad? IPAD? Are you insane?

Cullen said...

'Fly: My wife had the first generation enV and then upgraded to the Voyager. She found that having a web-enabled phone that wasn't a "smart" phone was terribly annoying. She did really like the physical keyboard.

I don't have any issues with the touchscreen keyboards. I find it faster to type on them than the little physical keys. Go figure.

Ricki, MM: Yes. iPad. I mean, I get it - iPod, IPad - but dudes. Not only must there not have been any women in that naming meeting, there must not have been any married men. Or fathers.

Mr. Bingley said...

You need an iPad for your iDays.


I think it's an interesting device; I'd love to get my hands on one and play around with it, and the intro price is certainly very aggressive; I think it certainly compares very favorably with the high-end Kindle. I think there's a lot of potential for colleges to use these as textbook replacements, for example.

As a 20+ year Apple cultist I lurve this stuff, but is this something at this point I'm going to buy/need/use? Eh, instead of $500-ish for this I'd rather pony up the money for a full-fledged MacBook, I think.

Cullen said...

Meh. I guess it has a degree of "Ooh, shiny!" to it, but the HP Slate and the Lenovo U1 both intrigue me far more in that regard. I'm no Appict though.

I am sure that there will be tons of people who buy this and I'm sure there are tons of people who'll buy the entry-level product and think they got a bargain. Which blows me away when I can spend $300 on a netbook and get 10 times the functionality. I could understand the iPhone and iPod, they fill a very distinct role and do a lot of other things very well. The iPad just strikes me as either a really expensive e-book reader or a really underpowered netbook.

Mr. Bingley said...

actually, it would be awkward to have a camera in that thing, it seems to me, unless you have some type of a stand to hold it vertically. if it's sitting fairly flat on your lap, do you really want to hunch over?