| Friday, November 17, 2006 |
13:07 - Life under a rock
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It's true, I haven't exactly been paying attention to any of the iPhone rumors that have evidently been flying fast and furious lately. Mostly that's attributable to the fact that anything with the word "phone" in it switches me right off—to me, mobile phones are a squalid, tawdry phenomenon unworthy of Apple's attention. Every time I see a line of teenage girls flouncing through a mall, clearly all part of the same group of friends but each one with a phone to her head, each one deep into her own private conversation; not to mention every time I'm in the movie theater and someone's phone chirps to life with a harshly digitized version of some hackneyed quote from a completely different movie—I think to myself, "God, I hope I don't ever have to fume at Apple for contributing to this."
But if what I'm hearing is true—that the iPhone is not meant to be a PDA like the Treo, but rather just "an iPod with a phone"—then I have to imagine that the real purpose of such a product isn't the "phone" part after all. Like one of those insufferable cellphone companies' ads says, "it's the network".
In other words, the phone is just incidental. If an iPod were to gain EVDO wireless access, it would be able to do all the music-purchasing-and-downloading that more and more phones seem able to do these days; and what's more, it would then be able to sync those songs back into iTunes, where you could make playlists and burn CDs, something that I presume cellphones can't do (if the music-syncing software that Cingular is selling for $50 is any indication). It would make the iPod into a potential source for your iTunes music, not just a receptacle for it.
And wouldn't that just knock the Zune into a cocked hat?
Rather than having to seek out another iPod user with beaming capabilities (something that's far more likely to happen than with the Zune, at any rate—you want to see the "social" that Microsoft covets, go to the gym and count the white earbuds), you could just get the songs you want right from the iTunes Store, no matter where you are. Hell, you could even beam them to each other Zune-style—but since every iPhone would be hooked into the iTunes Store, you might as well just beam each other download queue requests so you could get the 30-second previews for free and then buy the full songs right from the phone. You wouldn't even have to be within Wi-Fi range of the other guy. In other words, you wouldn't need a "social". If the Zune's "social" only exists because the people in it hope to get each other's music out of the deal, it seems like it's on shaky conceptual ground to begin with (how do you go up to the tank-topped guy on the ab machine and say, "Uh, hey—want to squirt me a song?"); but if anybody can get any music at any time, not just what the people around them have handy, then they can be "social" based on actual shared interests, not just musical avarice.
Not to mention being able to download TV shows and movies from the road or the treadmill, and then keep them on your computer after you sync. Fresh podcast episodes. Audiobooks. Games. Best of all, you wouldn't need to muck with the controls; this could all happen within the click-wheel paradigm—no keypad or stylus or slide-out panel or anything needed.
Oh, and you can make phone calls with it too? Hey, bonus. But why even bother calling it an "iPhone" anyway? Why shouldn't this just be the next iPod?
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Brian Tiemann
