Nobody outside Apple has used the iPhone, it does not ship until June, and I have now read several thousand words of analysis about it. Rather than add to that, here are the questions I think actually determine whether it works, none of which were answered in January.
The first is whether you can type on it. Apple has removed the keyboard, which is the single most confident decision in the whole design, and everything depends on a piece of software nobody has been allowed to test. Every phone I have used with a virtual keyboard has been unpleasant. Apple says its version predicts and corrects well enough that the missing physical keys stop mattering. That claim cannot be evaluated from a stage demonstration performed by somebody who has been practising for months, and it is the difference between a revolutionary device and an expensive one people quietly stop using.
The second is the network. This is a phone announced in 2007 that runs on EDGE. Not 3G. The whole argument I made in December was that faster radios were the year’s real progress, because a browser is intolerable at 2G speeds and merely bad at 3G ones. Apple has built the best mobile browser anybody has demonstrated and attached it to the slower radio. Wi-Fi covers this at home and at a desk. It does not cover this on a train.
The third, and the one I think matters most in five years, is whether anybody other than Apple can write software for it. There has been no announcement of a development kit. The stated position is that web applications are the model, which is a polite way of saying no. If that holds, Apple has built the most capable pocket computer ever made and forbidden anybody from using the capability, which would be a genuinely strange decision from a company whose desktop platform lives on third-party software.
I keep coming back to something I wrote in September, when the rumour was still just a rumour: that the hard part was never the hardware, it was the carrier. That turned out to be exactly right and Apple appears to have won it. Cingular has agreed to a device it did not design, cannot brand, and does not load with its own software. No handset maker has ever extracted that. Whatever else this product does, it has already changed what is negotiable in that relationship.
The price is the part I have least patience with. Five hundred dollars, with a two year contract, is not a phone price, it is a phone price plus a laptop’s worth of ambition. Apple is asking for both the subsidised commitment and the premium, which is a thing the market usually punishes.
The Cisco business resolved itself sensibly, as trademark disputes generally do once lawyers have been paid. It was never going to stop anything.
What I would say to anybody asking whether to wait for it: wait, obviously, because there is nothing else like it announced and four months is not long. Just be aware that everything currently known about this device comes from a company selling it, and the three questions above are the ones a demonstration cannot answer.