iPhone 4

Seriously, no comments on the iPhone 4 here yet? I know the love is out there for Apple, but this seems kind of odd for this kind of silence on this BBS. A nice shiny retina display. Two way video calling. A multitasking operating system. What’s not to love?

I recently traded my iPhone 3G (not S) for a Blackberry Curve 8900. The iPhone was the first data capable phone I’d had since my trusty Motorola Q which I loved for “business”. The iPhone was easily the best phone I’d ever had. Until I had to actually use it. The BB I have is not great either. I found a hacked OS image to upgrade to 5 and that made the graphics better, but it takes almost twice as long as the iPhone to boot. On top of that, it has memory leaks and every 3-5 days (about two full charge cycles) it becomes unresponsive with the only solid solution being a battery pull.

We recently did an upgrade to our email system and I’ve seen a lot of BB’s in the last week. It seems that BB users are just “used” to slow phones. The input on a BB with a real keyboard trumps the pretty-ness of the iPhone, but it sucks having to pick the lesser of two Hosannas. And although the BB enterprise sync software seems to work amazingly well, I’ll trust Microsoft Activesync running on an iPhone way before I ever trust BB to properly route email reliably.

But I know what I want now.

It’s a iPhone 4 that works without being told how to hold it, and without being lied to about signal strength for 4 generations of the product. I want that beautiful display with an option for a double capacity battery. I want the two way video calling, but I want it using an future codec like VP8 so when the rest of the world catches up I can claim I was doing that old school. And finally, I want a slide out keyboard with keyboard shortcuts that work consistently across the OS.

I don’t need a network that has 3G/4G/whateverG speed. It would be nice, but I do want solid reliable wifi speed that doesn’t drain the battery like its running in a for while loop. I don’t need it to be unlocked because if it works out of the box, and those around me get better features over the next 24 months, that’s OK. My tarrif will be up, and I’ll go get another phone with the next generation of tidbits. I don’t need a “case” for the phone either. The phone should be scratch resistant enough to live in my pocket with my plastic key-fob without looking like its run through a dryer with small rocks in it.

I’ve been shopping around. Some of the Android phones from HTC come close from an unannounced rumor product standpoint, but so far everything is vaporware. With the iPhone being the “bar” to meet, the mobile phone industry has forgotten that usability is more important being a sexy equal to Apple. From what I see of Froyo, even taking out the ridiculous Adobe Flash rant, there is a lot to love. Developers having their rights stripped away in the Apple camp are moving in droves to the Android platform in a similar way that there is a three way horse race between Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo in the console arena. We need another couple of “consumer” mobile phone operating systems equal in merit in different use cases. Motorola who traditionally made the best of the best phones was almost down for the count, but hopefully they have their act back together.

So what is your favorite future phone?