Apple iPhoneEveryone has an opinion on the new iPhone by Apple. As a long time admirer of Apple (heck, I still have the first PDA ever, Apple’s Newton), I have an opinion as well.

First off, its an amazing device – but marketing it as a phone does not work for me. I would almost say that if you consider it as a phone, it is an overly expensive and fragile piece of hardware (although very cool). Just think about the horror of dropping it accidentally and cracking the display – how many times did you drop your phone to see it bouncing off the floor, sliding face down across the room or just forgetting it somewhere? Try doing that with a $500 phone with a huge LCD.

In addition, I guess I am not so excited about this as a phone also because personally my phone life does not involve browsing the web, or playing music. I am OK with separating my music (iPod 4G, quite old nowadays) from my phone (those get smaller by the day). I just need to be able to call or receive calls.

However…

The most exciting thing about this device is its amazing user interface. I is almost an alien technology: Its so much more advanced then anything on the market today, that it would take years for anyone to duplicate the UI with any degree of success. This is the main reason I am still considering buying this adorable device: To be able to scroll stuff, view photos and resize things all day long.

For me, the killer feature is actually text entry and retrieval. I tried for years all sorts of devices: Starting from the Apple Newton, which was a very ambitious effort, but due to high cost ($800), too slow CPU, imperfect hand-writing recognition software and too big form factor did not make it. It was a huge idea, but they needed hardware that was only appearing years after.

I used Palm V for a year or two – its quite convenient to read and retrieve, but for me the experience of writing using the stylus did not work, handwriting recognition sucks, and portable keyboard is too bulky.

Consider the iPhone, now: Having a device that allows you to write text, send it as email and view it in the best UI ever (which only Apple can deliver) might be the winning solution. It still seems to be proven how easy it is to enter text through the thumb-based interface. Even it is quite expensive as a content writing and retrieval gadget, it might be still a winner.

The next OS?

Which leads me to the revelation: I am predicting that a few months after this gadget hits production, Apple would reveal the new iMac that has the same user interface (UI). Imagine a desktop OS that behaves with the same elegance and flow – dragging windows, arranging images, smart context-sensitive dialogs, tactile scrolling, etc. Apple did the unbelievable and put OS-X on a slim portable gadget – now, once the UI technology matures, the next big thing would be to complete the full loop and bring this innovative UI to the desktop.

Obviously this is not an easy feat: I can think easily of many challenges. How would you “right click” without a mouse? How would you make all buttons and widgets finger friendly? What would you do with all the applications out there? All in all, quite challenging. But Apple had already demonstrated that they can deliver. They can do this again.

Wouldn’t that be something? What do you think?

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