Please, please let these screenshots be not fake. (via fscklog)

‘There’s no Nike+ app for it!’ has been one of the few remaining counter-arguments of me buying an iPhone. My late iPod nano has left me with a remaining, unusable (on its own) Nike+ set of pedometer and receiver, and I sure wouldn’t mind being able to use those again. At the same time, replacing my mediocre¹ Sony Ericsson T610 with a more powerful substitute might make sense, especially when that substitute can also serve as my new portable music player. Who doesn’t like convergence, when it’s done really well?

Each day, I spend close to an hour commuting in the train (25-ish minutes back and forth), during which I currently have no Internet connection. Now, if I could spend some of that time more usefully, other than reading unread tweets or solving Sudoku, that might be nice indeed.

Issues with the App Store aren’t the only kind of thing that scare me. It’s hard to believe, but this device would actually be a step back in Bluetooth support compared to my T610. Puzzling, because Apple arguably pioneered Bluetooth support on personal computers, offering a useful solution years before Windows XP finally did with Service Pack 2. Then, in 2007, it quietly dropped Address Book Bluetooth support (such as for sending text messages right to the currently open contact) with OS X 10.5², and shipped the iPhone with only supporting headsets. No A2DP, no file transfer, no modem tethering… I was hoping these were simply features they’d ship after higher priorities have been resolved, but even with the 2.1 previews, we have no improvement. No cabled tethering either, unless you count the unsupported, currently unavailable NetShare app, which is merely a SOCKS 5 proxy, thus hardly offering a full solution.

On the bright side, we have a user interface that doesn’t try to scale down the traditional personal computer desktop to a small screen variant. Many of the controls have clearly been conceived from scratch, which is in stark contrast to most other smartphone UIs.

And then, finally, we have T-Mobile’s rates. I have yet to see a single comparison where any other provider in Germany comes out cheaper (the ones I’ve seen need to go back to arithmetics 101, it seems), but there’s a difference between being competitive and being affordable. You see, before last summer, I didn’t have a cellphone for years. And I kind of liked it that way. Or, shall we say, I didn’t miss it — most of the time. There are those moments where you’re unexpectedly and randomly stuck someplace, sometime, and if you could make just this one phone call, it would fix it all. And with the job, of course, I get called quite a bit more. But overall, I’m not even sure I average one call a week.

So you can perhaps tell I’m not exactly the most likely target audience for this product. I’d use the iPod aspect daily. Same goes, probably, for e-mail and other lightweight Internet-bound apps. And the PIM aspects — calendar, contacts, notes. But as for all things cellular, whether audio or text, I’m just not much of a user.

And so I’m in this unusual situation where what I’d really like to have is unlimited (or a very high limit of) data, but very low limits of calls and messages. Shame I’m in such a minority.

Why not the iPod touch, you ask? Because I’d be back to square zero regarding Internet connectivity in the train. (A 3G ExpressCard plus an iPod nano would be a more feasible alternative to that.)

1. Yes, I know what they say: gift, horse, mouse, yaddayadda. Now that the battery and charging cable have been replaced, it does the basic job fine! ↩
2. Although, at the same time, they did add A2DP support. ↩

• The extended downtime, delays at stores, temporary bricking (in many cases during all working hours of today) that seemed to affect the .mac → Mobile Me transition, the iPhone and iPod touch 2.0 firmware release, the iPhone 3G first day of sale at stores and the launch of the App Store altogether have made for negative press. The flak frankly seems deserved to me. Whether they ran into unexpected issues late in the development process, didn’t expect as much demand, or failed to deliver for some other reason, it simply sheds a terrible light on this launch day. Wasn’t one of the three major improvements summarized as “Enterprise support”? Don’t Enterprise™s typically want to, say, actually use their products?

  They could have launched Mobile Me next week, or the week before that. Could have launched the App Store some other time. Could have said “hey, we’re just not ready; let’s delay this just a little bit as to make for a smoother initial run”.

  This boils down to human error, and other companies would have suffered the same. But maybe they wouldn’t have applied the false pride of doing too many things at once.

• I reject the idea that the App Store should serve as a cream-of-the-crop selection of iPhone/iPod touch applications. How, then, would I retrieve applications Apple deems unworthy or subpar? Short of jailbreaking (and special, limited enterprise and ad hoc options), the App Store is the only source of apps, and it is censored enough as it is. It is thus that tweets demanding that Apple be the arbiter of quality not only annoy me; they concern me.

  I can sort-of accept the limitations Apple is imposing; they did provide a rationale, more or less (however, why make the DRM mandatory, rather than letting developers choose on their own?). I also hold that Apple tends to have rather good taste in their decisions, and this may very well translate to a rather good selection of third-party applications. But already, the arbitrariness of ‘arbiter’ is showing. Good app? Bad app? You don’t decide. The reviews don’t decide. Apple does, and some people outside the company actually seem to like it that way. Disturbing.

• To end this on a positive note: while I don’t have a chance to test them (and let’s not even start about how trials and beta tests are pretty much impossible in the App Store), I hear there are, indeed, some excellent apps out there already. This tempts me greatly to buy an iPhone, even when I have my doubts I’d actually use it to its full potential.