iPhone and iTV opinions January 10, 2007
Posted by James Webster in : apple , trackbackLet me join the chorus of amateur punditry that has flooded the Internet post-Stevenote…
- iPhone: it certainly looks neat but I am not sure whether it will displace the current phone I am waiting for, the Nokia N95. It is a little uncertain what the extensibility model is at the moment beyond Widgets. The tech specs make no mention of Java MIDP which would be a disappointing omission however it is apparently running a slimmed-down version of OS X, so it may be eventually possible. Apple is quite keen on keeping the user experience of their consumer devices locked within carefully defined parameters however, so it might not officially happen if they don’t want it to. I also wonder which Australian carrier might be Apple’s partner Down Under, I doubt it will be Telstra since they have been closely aligned with Microsoft in the past. Vodafone also seems to be unlikely given they have a presence in the US (Verizon Wireless) and Apple chose to partner with Cingular. Perhaps it will be Optus? Ultimately I hope the iPhone evolves to being carrier-agnostic.
- AppleTV: this might be the device that defines the ‘digital media in your living room’ genre for two reasons according to my reading of the tech specs; 1. it supports MPEG-4 in addition to H.264 so everyone’s BitTorrented video should just work, 2. it supports Windows XP so it won’t be necessary to buy a Windows Media Center edition of XP or Vista to work with your XBox 360 (which also requires your video to be encoded as WMV, unless you use the Transcode 360 product which requires a degree of fiddling. Disappointingly it does not appear at the moment to have an extensibility mechanism, it would be great if it supported Dashboard Widgets since they are going to be present on your Mac Dashboard AND now your iPhone. And where is the YouTube integration that surely Apple board member and ‘GooTube’ CEO Eric Schmidt must have considered?
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Telstra have been rolling out their EDGE network, so you might just see Apple + Telstra. Although I would prefer if they went with 3, but the iPhone doesn’t look like it supports 3G.
Jim, It looks like it should be on sale in retail too.. they are doing the right thing by keeping it quadband GSM which makes it carrier agnostic. Also its not 3G which means the data transfers on the cell network maynot be as smooth. But certainly with 802.11g capability you would use the local wireless service wherever available.