The PDA Guerilla: The New Apple Phone

As controversial as it is beautiful, Apple's new cell phone has become the center of attention since Steve Jobs announced it at Mac World Tuesday. He had barely uttered the name "iPhone" before Apple found itself in a lawsuit with Cisco over the moniker. Now it appears that the design itself may be very similar to the LG KE850, a cell phone announced with little fanfare in the US in December but which won International Forum Design Product Design Award for 2006. At least they look strikingly alike. Whether this will engender another lawsuit remains to be seen.

These issues aside, the new cell, which I will call the "Apple phone" for now, certainly is stunning at first glance, and first impressions mean a lot. I see some real advances here, and I am sure that it will be in demand among the affluent tech cognizanti, to the point that it may even cause some to switch to Cingular from other North American carriers. But at the same time I am disappointed at some of the decisions at Apple that will keep this device from reaching its full potential, and it is not the phone for me, personally. So here is my reaction in detail:

First off, I love the screen. Compared to the small screens of previous smart phones such as the Palm Treos, it is brilliant. With the all-screen design, you can use a virtual keypad to dial, a virtual keyboard to enter text, and the full screen to view information, watch videos, or read e-books. Virtual keyboards are not new -- I have been using the Fitaly virtual keyboard on my Palm T3 for several years. So why has Palm been so wedded to the thumbboard kluge for its Treos, when the virtual approach is so much more elegant and flexible?

Second the Apple phone will have either 4 or 8 GB of memory. Of course we don't know how much of that is used for the OS and applications, but this is an order of magnitude more than other smartphones. Palm has yet to field a Treo with even 1 GB. If Apple can put 8 GB it its phone, why can't everyone else?

Third, the Apple phone has WiFi (and Bluetooth) built in. It is past time for the cellular industry in North America to wake up and realize that WiFi and Bluetooth are basic necessities for all high-end devices. The carriers don't want that because they see WiFi, and particularly the growing number of municipal WiFi systems, as the competition. Like it or not, WiFi is a fact of life in offices, restaurants, motels and hotels, and in a growing number of municipalities, and mobile devices that aren't WiFi enabled are crippled out of the box. Again, Palm in particular needs to realize this.

On the other hand, the Apple phone has two huge limitations that all but eliminate it from the smart phone class. First, it is a closed system. Apple has confirmed that it will not allow any third-party applications on the phone, at least for now. This is a huge mistake. Third-party applications drive the high-end market. I, for instance, have 35 on my PDA, some replacing built-in applications, others adding functions that Palm never envisioned. That won't happen on the Apple phone, which means it cannot become the PDA replacement I had hoped when I first saw the images online.

Second, it uses OSX. Now OSX is a perfectly good, advanced operating system -- for the desktop. But the kind of applications that people want on pervasive devices simply haven't been written for OSX. So even if Apple does open the device in the future, it will not have the library of hundreds of creative applications available on the Palm OS and WinMobile.

So the question now is, how will the competition respond. I believe the Apple phone leaves the door wide open for a next generation smartphone designed as both a business productivity tool (a market that Apple has shut itself out of with the decision to close its phone to third party applications), and personal digital assistant/entertainment device. If a company like Palm or Hewlett-Packard takes the best features from the Apple phone and combines them with the best of their technology, the result could be a huge leap forward. Imagine a phone with WiFi, bluetooth, and cellular, that could be your VoIP handset in the office and cell phone outside, with a PDA-sized screen backed by 4 GB or 8 GB of memory, able to run all those third party applications available on either WinMobile or the Palm OS and play MP3s and run video. Add built-in GPS and support for 4 GB SD cards, and you have a true, multifunctional, next generation device that could quickly become a necessity for mobile workers, a constant companion and, for some, a laptop replacement at half the cost of a high-end laptop.