Why my iPhone is so depressing

… Well I just dropped it today with a dent on one of its aluminum frame corner (its the old 2G, the new ones comes in polycarbthingy plastic) *cry*

Anyways enough digress, coincidentally, I was drafting on this post yesterday to do a writeup on the iPhone and how it come to being as THE phone since its inception in 2007 and also in conjunction with the latest 2009 iPhone 3GS launch in Malaysia (FYI I am not affiliated with Maxis in any way) Anyways for a quick history on the iPhone you can check it out on Wikipedia here.

My fruit basket - an apple and a berry

So what so great about the iPhone and being a user so far?

For one, the iPhone made a huge paradigm shift to the mobile phone industry and the way we use our phone. For one, everyone wouldn’t expect that Apple will release a…. phone (huh?) And being a first time player against the huge established players like Nokia, Motorola, SE and Samsung…. the odds doesn’t look in their favor. Even punters back in 2005 thinks that there’s a 50% chance that Apple will not release such a product. But true to Steve Job’s vision of a unified home and communications system, he did it anyway and 2007 blew everyone away with this odd one button device.

Business 2.0 July 2005 showing the concept iPhone ...FAIL

Second, its the first phone that have only ONE button on its hardware interface (excluding the volume, mute and power on buttons on the side). My first question when I saw this was, wheres the answer and call reject button which I am so used to my Windows Mobile 6.0 PDA phone? Where’s ALL the buttons like Blackberry! How can you operate a phone with only one button?? That where the sheer elegance of the phone kicks in with its touchscreen interface. This phone was designed with elegance foremost in mind; simple to use yet deep in features and capabilities. It was built with a human touch of sensibility e.g. while listening to a music, if a call comes in it will pause the music for you to pick up the call. Once the call is over, the music resumes… sheer detail brilliance.

Third, unlike all the mobile phones of that time, major manufacturers are basically piling up features after features since the mobile phone was created (MMS, Wifi, camera, GPS, 3G, Calculator, clock, kitchin sink etc, etc.) till it become a huge pile of a thingamajig device and 80% of the time we use it for phone calls and SMS. The iPhone came in mind with a generic baseline hardware where YOU determine what features you want via the software in iTunes. So almost two iPhones won’t be alike in terms of functionality (unless of course you just using the base phone). Effectively Apple took the bottom up approach rather than spamming more features like the other manufacturers. Suddenly using other features beside call and SMS becomes more fun.

Forth, eventhough its a 2007 model in the year of 2009 … the iPhone still looks super sexy and no phone comes close till today, a hallmark of good design. Ok guess I’ve find myself an excuse to upgrade to the new iPhone 3GS then lauching this Friday 31st July 2009 by Maxis and current rate plan looks good. For a 3rd party prespective, check out the Lowyat.net forum here on the breakdown and discussion on Maxis’ offer.

Tagged as: iPhone