Not A Blog™

I suppose I must commit this article to an expiration date and discuss that newfangled shine, the iPhone. Now that it’s finally been released, everyone’s talking about it. You may recall that I talked about it some months ago. I stand by what I said. (Also: I refuse to make lame “lower case i followed by a word” jokes.)

My original reasoning behind the fallacy of the all-in-one wonder was that batteries aren’t efficient enough. If I have a gadget that plays music, and a gadget that is a phone, the electrons in the phone are worth more to me than the electrons in the music player. If these things are combined, I now have to save the electrons for the phone, preventing me from listening to music. I was pleased to see that the iPhone actually remedies this problem by have two batteries: one for the player and one for the phone. That’s cool. It’s a work-around until such a time when we develop better battery technology, but it does alleviate the problem of electron economics.

With that in mind, I still don’t want one.

There are other things which make all-in-one devices less than appealing to me, and the iPhone embodies this. I didn’t mention them in the previous article because I just didn’t think about the two-battery solution. (In practice, I imagine the batteries are tied together in some way, still making electron economics a problem, but I haven’t done any research to verify this.) But now that the iPhone is out, things I write are no longer mere speculation, and I can say exactly why I don’t want one.

But more relevant than saying what I don’t want in the iPhone is to say what I do want in the iPod. Since I’ve been using it, there are some features that the player needs. These things might have been introduced in the 5.5 generation iPod (I’ve only got a 5G, alas), and I haven’t looked into it one way or the other. Here’s what I’d like to see added to my iPod:

• I wish that when a song is pulled up via the shuffle mode, there was a way to jump to the album that song is in. Often, I’ll hop in my car, and I don’t want the burden of selecting appropriate music. I’ll put the thing on shuffle and off we go. Sometimes the iPod pulls up just what I wanted to hear, but I didn’t even know it myself. Other times, it’ll throw fifteen misses at me before it selects something I’ll put up with. But when the iPod does pull up that perfect song which takes into account my mood, the weather, the amount of traffic on the road, length of my drive—all the factors that I consider when deciding music for myself—when the iPod hits the right music, I want to be able to select that whole album with just another few clicks. But I can’t. I have to back all the way out of shuffle mode and scramble through the list to pull up that album. It’s just more trouble than it’s worth.
• Speaking of shuffling, there needs to be a way to shuffle what’s in certain folders. Sometimes I want to listen to techno, but I don’t know which techno. Why can’t I shuffle the techno folder? Yes, I know I can click and hold the folder to add it as a play list, but it’s still in order. Sometimes I like my random within definite bounds.
• Another feature which would be really handy would be to illuminate the headphone jack. This can’t be hard at all. The screen is already super-bright at night; just divert some of those photons into the headphone input so when it’s dark out, I can see where to plug the dang things in. This happens a surprising amount with me—more than I would have suspected, anyway—and the implementation would be simple.

There are a few other minor gripes I have, but this is sufficient to illustrate my main point, which is: everything that I’d like to see the iPod have is something which would make it a better music player. (Footnote: yes, I know Apple is all about simplicity, so having the option to jump from a randomly selected song to its album would add complexity to an otherwise elegant device. But I think this would make for a better player.) There is nothing in my list which would add functionality which does not directly impact my enjoyment of music.

This is in contrast to cell phones. I can’t honestly say I would want a phone that was nothing more than a speaker, mic, and numbers. There are a lot of features on my phone which I use that are not specific to the phone part. However, these features are very often things which aid in communication in various forms: text messaging, answering machine service, storing contact info; that sort of thing. Every once in a blue moon I use the calculator, or punch in a note, or use the alarm clock, but none of these things do I consider indispensable, and I could get by without them. In other words, my phone is my communications device, and the one thing I don’t have on my phone which I wish I did is email. (I have a rudimentary form of text-messaging email, but it’s a pain.)

The problem with most phones today—including the iPhone—is that they add in a bunch of crap that does nothing to improve the usability of the device for communications. First on my gripe list is the camera. Okay, it does facilitate communication in a certain way of sharing photos and such, but I don’t need one now, and so long as the camera does not enable face-to-face Dick Tracy-esque communications, I don’t want one, either. Except in certain specific circumstances and gee-whiz application, the camera doesn’t improve the communications aspect of the phone.

And neither does a freakin’ MP3 player. That’s the thing that really bugs me. That’s not to say no one wants a phone+MP3 player in one device. Many a comment I’ve read consisted of something like, “I can’t wait until I don’t have to carry around all these separate devices anymore.” There is a logic to that I understand; I would also like to not carry around “all these devices”—which are actually only my phone and my music player. Although, I suppose if you had more than one phone, or something in addition to a phone and an MP3 player, that would be more of a benefit.

But the convenience of having these two devices combined into one does not offset the amount that each device must get worse, in order to form this unholy union. In the case of the iPhone, the max amount of storage it has (at the time of this writing), is a paltry 8 gigs. I’ve got more than three times that much in my iPod—and I have the smaller model. Not only that, but the only thing that’s on my iPod is media. I don’t have an OS (except the svelt iPod OS), or applications or whatever other telephony junk is going to be cluttering up the tiny 8 gb space on the iPhone.

The iPhone also has a camera, much to my chagrin. I hate the idea of paying for a camera in your phone. You can’t not get one. This is the stupidest thing ever. It also has wifi but—get this—you can’t use the wifi to connect to your computer. Wha-?

So the wifi leeches an internet connection when it’s in range of one, I understand this. But the only reason I really want wifi in a device—the only reason—IS TO CONNECT TO THE COMPUTER! That’s IT! The Zune comes out and it doesn’t do this. Okay, fair enough; nobody expects Microsoft to do anything but suck to begin with. But Apple? You Cupertinoites are supposed to be innovating this stuff. Come on. It’s the only wifi feature I want—and nobody is doing it. What’s it take, huh?

Wifi is yet another feature which is horned into this tiny device and it doesn’t improve the quality of the telephony or the music playing while also draining the battery. I guess it improves internet connectivity—and when there are more than two internet hotspots in Lancaster County, I’ll be interested.

Of course, the iPhone does have features which are pretty cool. The touch screen—if it works as advertised—will be nothing short of amazing. I don’t think it’ll take long for that technology to spread to other phones or computers, but right now the iPhone has got the edge. The widescreen is a welcome addition. The accelerometer, on the other hand, is useless junk that generates a huge “wow” factor but doesn’t improve usability and does nothing practical.

The conclusion here is very simple. I don’t want more stuff in my phone unless it’s directly improving the phone. An MP3 player does not make a better phone, and adding phone features into an MP3 player makes a worse player.

Why can’t Apple release the iPhone without the Phone part? Give me an iPod with a widescreen; that’s all I want, anyway: widescreen and better battery life. Multi-touch would be nice, but not necessary in a music player. Give it a nice video out—and get rid of the camera, accelerometer, bluetooth, wifi and all that garbage that makes the phone part only slightly more appealing than existing phones already on the market.

Besides, I hate phones as it is. I don’t want to spend more money for something I already try to use less.

-Ted