Reflections on the Stevenote

Well, it's taken some pretty drastic changes to get me back into the blog world. I never really left intentionally, I just haven't been excited about anything like this in a while. Yesterday, Apple announced the new iPhone—a revolutionary new device that combines the features of an iPod, cell phone, and PDA all into one single-button device. Yeah, leave it to Apple to create a new device with just one button! And we thought they had gotten over that one-button mouse thing.

There's lots of things to criticize about the device (short battery life and big price tag for two), but I'll leave that to the nay-sayers. Whatever it's not, the iPhone is a revolution in usable portable devices. Every cell phone I've ever had has always lacked at least one useful feature (speakerphone, bluetooth, etc.), and the features it did have were difficult to use if they worked at all. I gave up flip phones a while back because I hate trying to open them with one hand to take a call. My current phone has bluetooth, but if frequently drops the headset connection and syncing with my Mac is disabled by Sprint. The camera is poor quality (something like 0.3 Mega-pixels) and using the camera is harder than solving a Rubic's cube. T3hree-way calls are a joke—usually joining calls means hanging up on everyone. So the iPhone, if it works as described, solves all of the cell phone problems I've ever had.

I've also been in the market for a new iPod (I have the original shuffle) for over a year, so the iPhone meets me on that front too. Although, I'm a little disappointed at only getting 8GB of storage on a video-playing device. But hey, it's better than 1GB on a screen-less device.

And while I'm not thinking I'll do a lot of email, Web browsing or SMS from my phone, having those options is nice, especially laid out in Apple's intuitive style. Those features are also now more usable than ever (bandwidth issues aside), so maybe I will use them more.

All-in-all I'm excited that I can now call, email, watch movies, play music, SMS, surf the Net, use my bluetooth headset, circumnavigate the globe and take pictures of my cat, all from a device about the size of an iPod with only one button. Sign me up, Steve!

Oh, and Stevo also mentioned something about an Apple TV, but I've largely forgotten about that now.