iPhone 3G reaction: what wasn’t said
Picking up on another point raised in Rory Cellan-Jones’ sadly-apparently-needed rebuttal on the BBC’s coverage of the iPhone 3G announcement, it struck me that for all the welcome additions and improvements that have been addressed in this new incarnation of Apple’s super-phone, there were still one or two outstanding criticisms conspicuous by their apparent continuation in the new iteration.
Most of my points concern the camera. For heaven’s sake, 2MP was laughable all the way back in January 2007 when the iPhone was first announced - but for the new model to retain that woefully-inadequate pixel count in the face of a marketplace now saturated with 5+ megapixel offerings is mystifying. All the more so when you consider the cool new geotagging functionality coming our way in the iPhone 2.0 software release - it seems half of the iPhone dev team want us to be snapping away and are making efforts to make it even cooler than it already is, whilst the other half are treating the cameraphone the same way Apple treated the floppy disk with the original iMac - a fanciful, soon-to-be-obselete distraction for the userbase.
Keeping with the camera, what about video recording? Again, non-3G phones have been doing basic video for a couple of years now, even back when the first iPhone was announced. But for a smartphone to be coming out in 2008 with no video recording seems plain nuts to me.
Perhaps Apple really do think we don’t actually need these things, and isn’t a phone that’s an iPod and internet browser and email-doer and so on really quite special thank you very much etc. But for me, Apple as a company has a history of driving wider adoption of new, innovative but niche ideas and technologies, and is missing a big trick by crippling the iPhone in certain ways. I look the explosion of video-streaming blogsites and see friends starting to live-stream events that they’re at from their N95 and think, “damn, I can’t do that with my iPhone!” Since so much of this iPhone 2.0 wave seems to be about getting the product into many more pairs of hands around the world, and great leaps are already on their way with the awesome-looking App Store and the wealth of great third-party development in the pipeline for the phone, why not capitalize and drive some of these innovations forward the way the company did with the iMac and, lest we forget, the iPod?