Posted to Rants on Friday, 26th January, 2007.
After watching the Steve Jobs iPhone keynote, I have to say I’m a little disappointed. While this phone has a slicker GUI than any other phone I’ve seen, it’s not so much the $499 US price-tag, but the stone-age functionality of the phone that makes my jaw drop.
Here in Japan, for 1 yen, I can get the following in a cellphone:
- 3G download speeds of 50 Mb/s
- Two-way video-phone
- Built-in fingerprint scanner (for security checks)
- MP3 player and download service
- Edy BitWallet (like Interac, except you swipe your finger on the phone’s scanner to accept the transaction)
- Can be used as a Suica train pass
- Can buy movie tickets and scan in at the theatre, bypassing the lineup
- Can wave it at vending machines for food and drinks
- Will figure out train routes, transfer locations and times, and ticket prices
- Can scan barcodes which take you to websites – eg. scan at the bus station to pull up the schedule or scan a magazine to order a product
- MP3 player and download service
- Decent email (+ attachments), SMS, calendaring, notepad
- Automatic location triangulation (by determining which antennae are nearby) and location-aware mapping, shopping/restaurant listings
- Interactive mapping of current location with zooming and scrolling
- Integrated graphical web-browser
- Built-in TV tuner
- 1 megapixel Camera, Video camera
- Display/graph your phone usage to the day
- Can write and deploy your own Java/C/C++ applets
If you go for a high-end phone with more than the above, you’ll need to pay more than one yen, but the price range is normally below ¥20,000 ($200 Canadian). In its current state, the iPhone won’t sell in Japan even if it’s free; Apple is going to have to do some major work if it wants to compete with even the bare-bones models on the market in Japan.
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