It’s been one year already since the iPhone was launched. It still doesn’t feel that long ago to me that I was ravenously refreshing the Engadget live blog of Steve’s MacWorld keynote in January 2007 announcing it.
I remember just how wowed I was by it. It was like nothing that had come before it – so obviously a game-changing device. I’d never been a huge Apple fan – at the time I hadn’t used a Mac in many years and had never even owned an iPod.
But I was an instant iPhone fan. Knew I would have to have one – no question at all. It was amazing looking. Better still, it was big-time powerful – running a version of Max OS X !!! – that was a holy shit moment when that was mentioned.
And after one year (for me around 10 months of owning one), none of the luster has worn off. I’ve been a huge fan of, and power user of, mobile devices for many years. From very old-school PDAs from Phillips and Compaq, to some of the first real ‘converged’ smartphone sort of devices running Palm and Windows Mobile.
To say that none of those could hold a candle to the iPhone is a huge understatement. We all know the deal on that by now I think – quite a few other smartphones can easily trump the iPhone if it’s just a straight-up features comparison. The things that set the iPhone apart – way, way apart – are the unmatched user interface that makes it not just easy to use, but a real joy to use; the browser that makes a joke of every other mobile browser going; and that rock solid OS X under the hood.
Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet …
As exciting as the first year of the iPhone was for lots of us, I really think we have seen *nothing* yet. Year Two of the iPhone is going to pack in enough to be like dog years!
The upcoming iPhone 3G is exciting. I know many think the real improvements on it are not earth-shaking and that a V3 model sometime in 2009 will be a more major step forward in terms of design and new features etc. I think that may well be right – but 3G on its own (especially if you’re lucky and live in an excellent coverage area, which I do) and GPS are still a big deal. Safari plus near-always-on fast connections is a mighty good thing in my book.
iPhone going worldwide – launching the 3G model in 22 countries on July 11th and 70 or more during the rest of this year – is also exciting stuff. That’s going to grow the community of iPhone users (and hopefully our group of readers here) an awful lot. Hopefully it also means Apple hits or exceeds all their targets for millions of iPhones sold, and profits goals etc., and that they subsequently pump lots of that back into R&D and similar for future iPhones.
Most of all though, for me again it is all about the platform, the software. iPhone 2.0 and the iPhone App Store are THE big, big thing for Year Two in my view.
Exchange support and all the other corporate / security features added is a huge deal in terms of opening doors for the iPhone to make much greater inroads in business environments.
Contacts search, the ability to download images from Safari, mass delete and move actions in the email client, are all good additions as well – though it is still pretty baffling to see no MMS or copy&paste yet.
And the App Store – that is probably the single most exciting thing about Year Two for me right now. People have always talked about how ‘killer apps’ make a platform, whether it’s an operating system or the web, or a mobile device. Well, here come the killer apps. Tons of them I reckon.
Several of the apps we saw announced and demo-ed at the recent WWDC event were very, very impressive. Since then, just about every day I’ve seen reports on similarly exciting and impressive sounding news apps across all sorts of categories. Great looking games, ‘social’ sort of apps, and some seriously powerful looking productivity apps as well.
Yeah – I don’t think I could be much more hyped up than I am for how much fun iPhone’s Year Two is going to be.
How about you all? Any of you feel this pumped up about what this second year will bring? Or are you jaded by now and getting over all things iPhone?
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