Why I need a 3G iPhone and a cheap sub-notebook

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 05 March 2008 09:12

Business IT - Technology

While Steve Wozniak was giving his views about what's wrong - or rather what could be better - with the current spate of Apple products, I was winging it to a conference in warmer climes. However, some of the things Woz said about the iPhone and the MacBook Air almost eerily resonated with my experiences throughout my trip.

During my 2 hour flight a colleague was kind enough to lend me his iPhone to watch a bunch of presaved YouTube videos. I plugged in some earphones and in no time I was hooked.

Those who say that the iPhone is too small to watch videos on should give it a try. My eyes are not what they used to be but with a pair of reading glasses the iPhone was every bit as good as  - actually better than - the in-flight entertainment system with its tiny screen on the back of the seat, its limited choice of content and clumsy navigation system.

With a little more storage and battery power - and that's coming no doubt - the iPhone might even suffice as the portable entertainment unit for longer international flights. Then again, the same thing holds true for the 32GB iPod Touch, except it already has the necessary storage - although even more gigabytes would always be welcome.

After landing and checking into the conference, the limitations of the iPhone in its present form became apparent. As far as I could tell, my colleague who had a number of 3.5G mobile phones on his person was not using his jail-breaked iPhone for any phone or Internet functions at all - certainly not in the conference room itself where 2G coverage was so weak that his iPhone would regularly report that 'network coverage' had been lost entirely - although this was not a problem on his 3.5G phone.

I also had a 3.5G phone, an HTC Touch Dual 850 (with iPhone-esque TouchFlo interface) running Windows Mobile 6. This is obviously a very powerful device but compared to the iPhone it is clumsy to say the least, its user interface is a nightmare to navigate, its touch screen is hard to operate and the screen is too small to watch videos.

However, there were two areas where the HTC phone completely eclipsed the iPhone.