Thoughts on the Apple iPhone

It’s been reported that Apple are ready to put the "iPhone" into production. This brought back memories of a day earlier this year when I first got my hands on a shiny 30GB video iPod. My first impressions of the video iPod were mostly of awe. It truly was something to behold. The thin design, audio and video playback etc etc.

Then, later that week, I ran into a friend. He was keen to show me his shiny new phone – it was an orange Sony Ericsson Walkman phone. It was so packed full of features it could have burst: video playback, audio playback, camera, voice recording, fm/am radio, and last but not least, voice calls. In addition it was pretty versatile in that it hand room for an SD card, that could go to 2GB. Not to mention the responsiveness of the menu system – everything was immediate. And the battery life was just great. I looked back at my iPod, the lag in the menu as the HD spins up began to bug me. And then I began to think about the features on the iPod, video and mp3 and not a whole lot more. Oh yeah, and the battery life, 2 hours or so of video and no more.

It was around this point that I began to wonder how the iPod could keep ahead in this climate of device convergence, and I wondered how long it might be before Apple added telephony to the list of features. Why buy an iPod with relatively limited (but dedicated) functionality when you get could by on one device that can do all the iPod could do and more…

This has been bugging the R&D team at Apple too, and the fruits of their labour are apparently about to go into production. What features will be included in the iPhone, and whether Apple can take a sizeable chunk of the market remain to be seen.