I'm a DefectiveByDesign subscriber, because I have a strong distaste for DRM.
Recently, DefectiveByDesign launched a campaign against iPhone, and generally, they fight against iPod and Apple products, because of the DRM employed in them.
Well.
You know what's sad?
Apple products rock. Seriously, they do. Did you ever hold an iPhone? Touched it? Typed on its wonderful multitouch-aware onscreen keyboard? That thing is damn sexy. And it Just Works (tm). And it's precise. There is no other device with the same degree of input precision on a touchscreen (yes, that is because of the multitouch capability, i.e. completely different principle of touch recognition), few devices with built-in gyrostat to detect device tilt, and none of them use it as well as iPhone does.
I mean, yes, there are "alternatives". They might be more powerful, more open, more compatible, better engineered or whatever.
And none of them holds a candle to iPhone's amazing usability and user experience. Plus, none of them can help you pick up chicks. iPhone can. Because iPhone is sexy.
I have a Cowon D2 player and i wouldn't trade it for an iPod. It has longer battery life, plays basically any format you throw at it, has a true DSP, works as mass storage, its firmware is updated regularly, blah, blah. Oh, and a touchscreen, of course. Yes, it outfeatures iPod in almost everything you can think of. But it's nowhere near as sexy.
And tell you what, average joe user does not give a rat's ass about features of D2. He has his Windows (or Mac) box with songs in mp3 format, and all he wants from a player is to actually play those songs. iPod does, and it does it sexy. Massively sexy.
I could go on for hours and hours about how Apple inovates while looking good. We all know it's true, even though some of us deny it. (Perhaps they are not Apple's original ideas, but it's Apple who shows them to the unwashed mass.)
The folks at DBD can bitch all they want, and they are right. The iPod and iPhone are bad, because they are all locked down and DRMed and stuff.
What is sad is that no other manufacturer takes on the challenge! Show me a single phone as cool as the iPhone. Show me a single player as cool as the iPod. Tell you what, there is none. iRiver Clix2 gets close, but not close enough.
DBD wants to pressure Apple into unlocking - "if you don't unlock, we'll go to the competition".
But the fact is that we won't, because iPhone is so damn cool.
Why, oh why, doesn't somebody pressure the competition into outsexying Apple?
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2 comments:
Well, I have always wanted to be a proud owner of iPhone, because almost everybody on whole internet just wrote how great it is and how poor are arguments of it's opponents. And when iPhone 3G appeared with it's low price, I was almost prepared to buy one. It looked sooooo sexy and nice and smart!
Hopefully, it turned out that one of our nice co-workers has this iPhone thing (strange is, that she uses it only as a mobile and camera and nothing more, because she got it as a present).
Well, now I am really glad that I have not bought this sex(y) toy :-).
At first, I was *really* impressed with quality of display, with touch sensitivity, with photo browser, with handling, and all ...
Then I have tried to type an SMS. On-screen keyboard was quite small so I thought "let's rotate phone to landscape, keyboard will rotate too and will be bigger". Guess what happened! Apple uses orientation sensor only for selected applications and SMS screen does not belong to them :((. Maybe T9 will help? Alas, no. Or, at least, not when you want to type anything in Czech language ...
Another thing is weight. Gosh, this device is heavy! I wouldn't want to have this one in my pocket. I hav always thought that with all those flash memories and Li-Ion batteries there does not have to by anything heavy in mobile phone, but Apple set me right ...
So after an hour of playing with Veronica's iPhone, I happily returned to combination of PDA (where I can tap on virtual keyboard with pen and press *exactly* the keys which I want) and lightweight & non-sexy mobile phone.
And I still listen MP3s on my no-name and absolutely non-sexy MP3 player without touch screen, whose look screams "hey, I am from cheap plastic". But it servers perfectly it's purpose: to play MP3 music. And it can be easily operated in pocket (play/pause, next/prev, ...), because buttons are mechanical and not virtual, and have distinct sizes and locations :)
But even when I know that design is not everything, I still long for something with would look as beautiful as Apple's iPhone ...
tell you what.
my roommate has an iPhone (first generation), so i get to play with it quite a bit. that was also the basis for my "review".
regarding keyboard - at first i thought that it would be impossible to type precisely on such small onscreen keyboard. i was proven wrong - unless you have extremely large thumbs, iPhone will know what key you meant, thanks to the multitouch screen technology
(i can't be sure, but as i imagine it, unlike regular touchscreen, iPhone scans shapes of objects that touch it, and can determine precisely where the center of your finger lies)
so my experience with typing on keys smaller than my fingers was outstanding.
regarding weight ... well, sure, it's not very light. but then again, i doubt that phone and PDA combined is lighter.
no, i would not want an iPhone - but mostly because of its size. i like things small, and iPhone is too big for a phone (but too small for an actual computer, that is why i don't have a PDA)
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