Farhad Manjoo describes today’s Steve Jobs’ keynote speech as underwhelming:
Gizmodo did Jobs’ presentation for him. In April, the gadget site purchased and dissected an iPhone prototype that an Apple employee had left behind in a Bay Area bar, and in May, another prototype somehow surfaced on a tech blog in Vietnam. As punishment, Apple banished Gizmodo from Jobs’ speech at the company’s developer conference this morning. (No word on what terrible fate will befall Vietnam.) By the time Apple’s CEO took the stage, then, the only real speculation centered around the new iPhone’s name. Would it be the iPhone HD, as some have speculated? Would Apple try to corner the market on names related to menstruation?
Actually, Apple is calling it the iPhone 4. Ho hum. (“Stop me if you’ve already seen this,” Jobs joked as pictures of the angular new device appeared on a giant video screen behind him.) The name is slightly confusing, as it suggests that the iPhone will run at so-called “4G” network speeds, which it won’t do. Instead, the 4 is simply a version number, and although Jobs points out that the phone’s external casing will act as an antenna, he doesn’t promise we’ll get any better voice or data reception with the new model. In fact, during Jobs’ first demo, the new phone struggled to pull up a Web page over Wi-Fi, while the old 3GS model he compared it with did just fine. When Jobs called out for help from the stage, a wiseass in the audience yelled, “Switch to Verizon!”
Kevin Kelleher notes that “If most gadget companies were to announce the iPhone 4 improvements that Steve Jobs did on Monday it would look like a major step forward.” And that today ended up “feeling anticlimactic.”
The stats:
• 24 percent thinner than the iPhone 3GS, making it the “thinnest smartphone on the planet.”
• Front camera for videoconferencing with standard VGA resolution
• Back camera is 5 megapixel w/LED flash
• HD video at 720p 30 frames per second w/iMovie for iPhone
• 960×640 “retina display” has four times as many pixels in the same screen size.
• A gyroscope.
• Better battery life.
• Microsoft’s Bing is now a search alternative to Google.
Few surprises. Incremental improvement. Is that enough?
On the occasion of that Gizmodo get, Manjoo observed that the first iPhone was so perfectly realized that changing it would ruin what makes it great. Of the iPhone 4 he concludes that there’s not a single indicator to suggest that the iPhone’s empire is about to collapse:
Just as with the iPod, Apple is relentless with upgrades; by the time its rivals catch up, it’s already surpassed them with new versions. Yet it’s also fanciful to expect the Apple to continue to dominate the phone market in the way it has crushed the competition with the iPod. The iPhone’s rivals are very good, and they’re getting better all the time. Android keeps attracting more device makers and programmers, and Google’s mobile operating system is leaping from phones into all kinds of new devices. In order to stay ahead, Apple will be forced to keep adding new features while also keeping its prices very low. Can it continue this pace? Let’s hope so—not just for Apple’s sake, but also because the intense rivalry in the mobile phone field has generated the most exciting tech products of the last decade. These phones are amazing, and they keep getting better and better.
I’ve contemplated switching to an Android phone. But things aren’t panning out as advertised. Apple’s at the top of its game. I’ll likely have an iPhone 4 by the 4th of July.
MORE: Apple’s spec page. Mashable details the iPhone’s new operating system. CNet has a collection of short video highlights from Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ WWDC presentation. Does the iPhone 4 kill the Flip?
You can find me @jwindish, at my Public Notebook, or email me at joe-AT-joewindish-DOT-com.