UPDATE and Correction (See below):
Unless you've been living in a cave, you probably have seen the Apple hype machine running full-bore trying to seduce you into buying one of the new iPhones, which come out today. However, if you're reading this instead of sitting in line with the rest of the techno-geeks, you probably won't get one today. Sorry. Them's the breaks. Limited supply, yadda yadda yadda.
When I saw the lines of the aforementioned techies on television, camped out in front of the Apple store overnight, it reminded me of the Star Wars geeks (many in costume) camping out for days in front of Grumman's Chinese Theater in Los Angeles awaiting the final installment of the Star Wars movie series... And we all remember how suckily that turned out.
I think that the techies will be a little more satisfied after forking over their $500 or $600 for their new gadget. However, I looked over the specs and noticed one glaring omission. It's a cell phone; it's an iPod; it's a web browser. All well and good. But where's the camera? Right now, many new cell phones have a media player built in or a camera built in, but not both. The real, true Holy Grail All-In-One device should have a cell phone, a web browser, a media player AND a camera. The iPhone may be a nifty little device, but it's not the Holy Grail. It's just a fancy gilded chalice. I'll wait until they come out with an iPhone that has a camera built in, and then I'll be lusting after getting one.
And the $600 one only has 8 GB of storage on it? Hey, that's the same size as my iPod Nano, which really only has 7.45 GB after you subtract out the operating system. The iPhone may be able to play videos, but it won't have a whole lot of space to store them, and they take up a lot of space. And how much of that memory will be taken up by the operating system for the cell phone and the web browsing software? Nope, I think I want more space than that. I know full well how quickly you can fill up 7.45 GB of storage!
So, Apple, give me a call when you come up with an iPhone with a camera and 16 GB of storage. Then we can talk...
UPDATE: 06/20/2007 22:15: It appears that I was wrong about one thing: The iPhone DOES have a 2.0 megapixel camera. So maybe it is the Holy Grail after all. However, I stand by my opinion about 8 GB of storage not being enough when video is involved. The limitations are due to the fact that, like the iPod Nano, the iPhone uses Flash memory for storage. Regular iPods that have 30 or 60 GB of storage have actual hard drives, as opposed to Flash memory, which has no moving parts and is less vulnerable to things going wrong. Anyway, if you are thinking about getting an iPhone, don't even think about getting the 4 GB model. If you can fork over $500 for an iPhone, you can afford to shell out another hundred bucks and more than double your storage space. Remember, the size of the operating system is the same whether you have 4 GB or 8 GB of storage.
