July 29, 2007
MarkBernstein.org
 

iPhone: 1 Month

I've had my iPhone for about a month. Following Dave Winer and others, it's time to take stock.

It's a beautiful appliance. Everyone seems to agree. It feels good in the hand. It's the right size. Its screen is superb — so good, in fact, that I think it's likely to push people toward higher-resolution laptop displays.

My guess for the future: a subminiature Mac laptop with a high resolution display and Flash memory instead of a hard disk, which means it could have a battery that can handle any flight on the new ultra-long-range Boeing without a recharge.

The software package is polished, elegant, and simple. The only thing that's worse on the iPhone than on the Treo is the To Do list. But these days, I just email tasks to my Tinderbox projects file; that's even better than the Treo.

The marketing lead-up and rollout was a thing of beauty, superbly executed.

The problem: it's an information appliance. It's a superb information appliance, it's the realization of a long dream in the tech community, but the flaw in that dream is that appliances are limited tools, not the limitless dream machines we call computers.

And it's a phone, too!