IraqiGeek's Blog

iPhone Announcement

First of all, I’m not a big fan of Apple. Nonetheless, I was quite impressed by their new iPhone. But despite its sleek, ultra cool looks, and the rather impressive spec sheet, there are still quite a few things that I want to know about this new cool toy before making my mind on whether I would want one.

Sure, on the paper all looks good, but there still are some of the things I want to know about the iPhone are: What kind of processor is it using? and how fast is it? How much RAM does it have? How much of a smudge magnet will the screen be? Equally important are things like how good will this “multi-touch” interface work? How good will the on screen keyboard be in the real world? how easy/hard will it be to develop 3rd party applications for it? when (if?) will Apple release the proper SDKs and development tools for this new toy, and how easy (hard?) will it be for developers to obtain those SDKs and tools?

Another thing that really concerns me, is whether Apple will follow on the same trend of offering the iPhone exclusively with a few select operators when the it is released in Europe and later in Asia. Tying customers to one specific carrier can be a major let down for many customers, most notably business customers who are the main users of smartphones.

Finally, there is the letigation Apple has with Cisco now about their ownership of the iPhone trademark. Unless this litigation is settled quickly, we will have to wait and see what Apple plans to do. Will they rename the iPhone? or will the launch be delayed until some sort of agreement is worked out? For better or worse, Cisco seems to have the upper hand in this trademark conflict.

I guess many of those questions will be answered when the iPhone makes it to the FCC for approval, most notably we will know quite a few more details about the hardware platform, and probably we will get a glimpse of the guts of the iPhone. For the other stuff, such as the details of the software platform and development tools, we will have to just sit back and wait for Apple to give us more details.