Sunday, November 11, 2007

iPhone this, something else that

So the iPhone was released in the UK on Friday. On upon seeing it for the first time revolving in a small cylindrical glass case in San Francisco eleven months ago, I knew that it would be a huge thing. I also knew that I wanted it. And that it would be at an extortionate price.

I'm not going to a Stephen
Fry delve deep into why I adore the device so much and why I want to make love to it (imagine that, through the headphone socket? That's awful), but I will do a Stewie Griffin, and give it a compliment sandwich instead.

THE MULTI-TOUCH SCREEN IS A GREAT ORIGINAL IDEA

Who'd have thought it? A huge touch screen instead of fiddly plastic buttons that are too small and too closely placed together is a good idea. Not the best of ideas, as I'll say later on, but better than a crappy cheap plastic thing.

THE MULTI-TOUCH SCREEN IS SOMETIMES CRAP

Before you start saying, hey, you've contradicted yourself, you stupid self-contradicting fool, I said above that it is a good original idea. But it does have flaws. Sometimes it becomes very easy to make mistakes if you're in a hurry, and sometimes the predictive text won't work as well either. But that's just like a normal mobile, you'll make a mistake and the predictive text can screw a sentence up. But some people may get irate after a while and do a John Dvorak.

THE ENTIRE INTERNET IN YOUR POCKET

How handy is that? The whole internet, in a beautiful web browser, all in your hand. I could really do with something like that for when I'm on the bus or Metro doing my "special pointless errands". And because I have high speed Wi-Fi in my house, I'd use it more than my laptop.

THE EDGE NETWORK ONLY COVERS 20% OF THE UK

Yes, it covers part of the area I live in, like some of the bus route and a little bit of the Metro route too. But if I was to go down the country or go up past the Scottish border, the EDGE network probably won't cover that area. And if it does, it'll be painfully slow. A guy called Joey from Indianapolis talked about his BlackBerry that uses the same AT&T EDGE network as the US iPhones, and he did not like it.

YOUTUBE WIDGET

This is genius. All the content of YouTube full screen on the beautiful multi-touch display. The ability to log in with your YouTube account and add videos to your favourites is great. In this Apple video, we see footage of a bunch of men attempting to jump a river on mountain bikes just shows you how endless YouTube is.

NO FLASH PLUG-IN

This is where the iPhone lets itself down severely. Although you can have as many YouTube videos as possible, you cannot access Vimeo or LiveVideo, which is pretty bad. At least the Wii contained a version of the Flash plug-in so we could use websites more efficiently, instead of no version of it leaving you annoyed and hairless.

And those are my views on the iPhone.

Not exactly a compliment sandwich, more of a compliment Big Mac.

2 comments:

Evan Hahn said...

"a compliment Big Mac."
Get it...??

Harry said...

Yes, conclusively I would get the iPhone.

But I don't want to be Stephen Fry.