Well, it seems like ol’ Steve J is back to his all tricks…this time, he an Apple, Inc. (no longer Apple Computers, Inc) have come up with the smartphone killer. Yes, indeed…the iPhone is finally out and, damn, it’s sweet!
As usual, Endgadget has the coverage of the whole SteveJ keynote and photos of the iPhone demo…and I’m still drooling :) Of course, if you read the comments, everybody and their Aunt Tilly has decided to weight in, both in favour and against the iPhone, specially the battery life (5hr talking or watching video, 16hr playing music…no word on standby duration) and the touchscreen. To this I have only one thing to say: Nobody has touched an iPhone yet, everything and anything they say is conjecture and bullshit :)
The features as demonstrated by SteveJ *are* drool-worthy…the implementation *looks* nice…but until somebody actually gets his/her hands on one of this beauties (they’ll start selling them in June), there’s not much that anybody can actually say about implementation details…unless, of course, Apple sends some iPhones for reviews out…if they do I WANT TO REVIEW ONE! :)
Steve also unveiled the old iTV, now under the name of AppleTV. It looks nice, a cute little box to plug into your widescreen TV (it’s designed for widescreen…I have no clue how good or not it’d work with normal-ratio TVs) and it communicates wirelessly with your network and you can show videos that are on your ATV on your computers and viceversa. It looks like an interesting competitor for MythTV and similar, for those that don’t want to go through the trouble that setting a DVR can be. It can by sync’ed with iTunes on any of your computers (PC or Mac…I guess no linux…for now :) so anything you buy on iTMS you can watch or listen to on your TV.
On the other hand, ATV as announced only has 40Gigs of storage, and…that’s way too little for most people. And the worse sin, IMNSHO, it only supports H.264 and protected H.264, which means iTMS stuff. No AVI, no Ogg, no nothing else :( Hopefully, some generous and smart hacker out there will find a way to fix Apple’s small oversight :)
There was other stuff talked about during the keynote…ipod sales, iTMS sales, Macs with Intel inside and so on and so forth…but the iPhone and AppleTV are the big ones this year…and the iPhone is trully deserving of being the centerpiece of the keynote…if it works as well as it sounds, it can be a revolution starter, just like the iPod was. The AppleTV…yes, it’s nice, yes it’s cute, but…the drawbacks are too hard for me to think of it as a real DVR killer, at least not yet.
Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, apple tv, steve jobs, steve jobs keynote, macworld 2007
Tags: Tech
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