It has been years since the purely technological could create any kind of public mania, perhaps because everything these days can be bought over the internet, but iPhone frenzy has gripped the planet, specifically the US, three days before the iPhone has arrived.
Queues are already forming outside the Apple and AT&T stores and given that the price of place in the line, is rumored to be as high as $300, anyone that thinks that paying $500 to $600 for an iPhone will be a problem, has already been proven wrong.
As the old joke goes, there are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don’t, and in the same peculiar way people are binary about the iPhone, those that want an iPhone and the handful of people who are irritated by Apple making such headway, so easily, into handsets, when its devices really aren’t so much better than Nokia or LG designs.
But the reviews coming out of the major US newspapers are turning the latter groups into iPhone lovers as well, with the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times both running reviews that are positively glowing, just in case anyone out there still hadn’t made up their mind yet.
At this rate stocks won’t last, and Apple will outdo even the most optimistic financial estimates that anyone has yet given for the phones, with words like ‘beautiful breakthrough,’ and ‘revolutionary,’ appearing in reviews. Apple has set its target out to sell 10 million devices by year end, what’s the betting it sells all it can make.
The touch screen worked well, the menus are simple, the whole thing is idiot proof on the plus side, while on the negative side small niggles like the absence of a comma on the keyboard, the number of keys you have to press to make a call being to high, and the lack of built in GPS.
And then the service plans were released to the public. A two year contract is needed, with AT&T, which start at $60 a month, and which all include a chunk of voice, unlimited data and the new scrolling feature for voicemail. That $60 gets you 450 minutes of cellular voice a month, and you must pay $80 for 900 minutes, $100 for 1,350 minutes.
One of the neatest add-ins is that the devices can be bought and registered online through iTunes, where they can also sync them for music and multimedia files.
At the same time last minute details are slipping out through the technology community, from when Apple has briefed developers, confirming that Apple will not support Adobe Flash, but will use QuickTime and its generic H.264 codec for all video, and it will use an Apple version of PDF code, not Acrobat. Also that the Safari browser only keeps eight Web pages in memory at one time, the phone will have no java and when video plays on a web page, the phone will automatically leap to full-screen playback. The iPhone will use a pinch finger command to shrink content, a double-tap to zoom it and the screen will allow two-fingered scrolling.
Devices will be in everyone’s hands by this time next week, and we should expect the first reliable teardowns, from taking a device apart and looking at all the components.