Law Technology

Apple Comes Out with an iPhone without the Phone

I was really excited about the iPhone coming out. It looked like Apple spent a lot of time on the interface and worked to make it very simple to use.

Anyone that has seen a demonstration of the iPhone with expanding or collapsing text by taking two fingers on the screen and pulling them apart or pushing them together can’t help but be taken by the gadget.

What held me back was that the phone was locked into AT&T service and you have to sign up for two years. I really wasn’t thrilled about that prospect. Another concern was how well the iPhone would synch with my case management system and contacts. I have 1,500 names and 2,500 numbers on my computer and all of those names and numbers are on my Treo. I believe that I would be able to sync to the iPhone eventually, but it would be a convoluted process and not direct at all.

So what do we have that’s good with an iPhone without the phone? Apple calls it the iPod Touch.

• Wi-Fi and Internet Surfing – the device works great with wi-fi, without 3G (which AT&T does not support) is painfully slow. This is a feature that the iPod Touch doesn’t have (the internet connection through the phone) and I won’t miss.
• Great 3.5” Screen and Video – I have an iPod Nano and a Shuffle. I wanted to get a video iPod when they came out, but with the speed that Apple comes out with products decided to wait a generation or two until they got it down pat. The iPod touch has a great screen for both web browsing, pictures and video.
• iPhone and iPod Interface – It’s got the great ‘mulit-touch’ interface as up above. It also has the iPod ‘cover flow’ interface where you can flip through songs like you are flipping through album covers.
• Mac OS X Operating System – The iPod works on a variation of Mac OS X. That means that there will be a lot of programs, widgets and other things that will be able t run on the iPod.
• 16 Gigs of Flash RAM – Flash RAM is great. It’s much faster than a hard drive and you don’t have to worry about access time or skipping. The drawback is that you don’t get as much memory. While you can’t hold your entire movie collection and every song you’ve ever heard, I don’t have any problems with 16 gigs of memory

Instead of an mp3 player with a pretty color screen, this is really a computer in a pocket. I’m looking forward to when these come out in a few weeks.

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Full post as published by South Carolina Trial Law Blog on September 09, 2007 (boomark / email).