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So yesterday Steve Jobs finally confirmed to everyone that Apple was indeed doing a cellular phone. Of course the rumor sites got things all wrong with their rumors, with most people expecting the phone to be just a phone with iPod functionality at its core.
The rumor sites couldnt have bought the bait any harder, hook, line and sinker then they did.
Sure, Steve announced a cellphone that combined iPod functionality. But to called the new phone an iPod merged with a phone would be to grossly gloss over the glaring fact that Apple has quite possibly resurrected the Newton. Only problem is, this time it runs some form of OS X, has a fully usable screen that is in color and might not need to rely on handwriting recognition software.
It is also a sexy piece of hardware. The announcement alone got massive press coverage and frankly was the coolest piece of gear not announced at CES. That isn’t to say that CES was devoid of interesting new products, but that show has so much going on and is so big its hard for the press to give everything a soundbite. However Apple knows this and Steve is notorious for keeping his keynotes on a straight and narrow message, giving the press lots of depth on a few key items. Combine this with Apple’s standard policy of not commenting on new products and its overall level of secrecy on developing projects and your end result is a large buzzing press machine anytime you make the press aware of an upcoming announcement. Its really pretty smart on Apples part as it lets them maximize their ability to make systems built from commodity parts that people already know exist and get excited about it.
However, this article isnt about how Apple gets the press corps on their side without having to resort to free hardware to review sites. What this is, is about why Steve Jobs would announce something as cutting edge as the iPhone without it being available till June, months after the announcement. I’ve got two words for reason behind the delay:
Think about this for a moment. Why would the phone not be ready right now? One obvious reason is that the device hasnt gotten FCC approval yet, otherwise the rumor sites would have had posts showing the FCC photos and tech specs of the device as it was being tested for compliance with FCC law. The hardware specs of the device are rather impressive, but the phone doesnt have HSDPA just EDGE, so that cant be holding it back.
No the problem stems from the fact that this phone can easily switch from portrait to a widescreen landscape mode and the phones OS can redraw the screen to best use the current screen orientation. More importantly, the screen size of the phone is larger then most all phones out now, but is still restrictive when compared to what a current computer running a standard desktop OS has to work with. Because of this it behooves Apple to ensure the OS that runs its phone can be flexible with its UI so as to make the best use of the screen real estate as possible. This also gives them the ability to arbitrarily zoom in or out of any application.
Another win for a iPhone using a resolution independent OS would be the resulting savings in the size of the OS. Based on the way Apple’s resolution independent patent is laid out an OS using this technology would have a greatly reduced number of bitmaps it would need to store on disk. This result comes about because many of the UI elements that would typically be stored as bitmaps are now programmatically generated by the graphics GPU for the OS.
But it wasn’t until I saw the post on Cabel’s Blog about Apples next generation theme system that everything clicked for me. The iPhone will run Leopard Embedded, or whatever Apple ends up calling the light version of OS X. It needs Leopard’s resolution independence to make full use of the iPhones screen real estate. But Leopard isn’t out yet, and notice that Steve Jobs didnt say a single peep about Leopard during the MacWorld keynote.
I personally believe Apple will release Leopard to the public in May of this year, giving them a month of time in use on the desktop side of the user base to try and catch any glaring bugs or issues. Apple will then push out a 10.5.1 update to OS X in June to concur with the rollout of the iPhone. This all adds up when I think about it. Apple didnt have the usual yearly refresh of iLife, and no one has even mentioned this odd lack of an update to something well known for yearly releases. This is of course because Apple is working on making iLife work with an as yet unreleased resolution independent OS, named Leopard, aka OS X 10.5.
Incidentally, if I were Steve Jobs, I would pay my team of lawyers enough money to deal with the Cisco trademark infringement lawsuit and then rename the device from iPhone to the Apple Phone, using the old Apple Computer bitten apple icon like they did with their Apple TV device at MacWorld.
There are still some unknowns about the iPhone for now, like 1st party applications verses 3rd party applications being allowed to run and install on the device. The lack of any kind of removeable media slot could be seen as limiting, especially depending on how much space the phones OS will require from the main flash memory. One potentially bright spot for the more hardcore phone freaks out there who are not a fan of Cingular, nee soon to be AT&T , should be able to get an iPhone without a contract for a higher price and then force Cingular to unlock the phone thanks to the recent DMCA ruling regarding carrier-locked cellular devices.
But for now we must wait to see what the iPhone develops into. I for one am greatly interested in it and how it ultimately turns out. If I had one thing to gripe about with it based on the currently available information it would be its lack of a 3G data technology like HSDPA. If Apple could correct that aspect of the phone I think they would have an even bigger winner on their hands.
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